2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Establishing a positive, fruitful, and mutually beneficial advising relationship is a time-consuming endeavor, one that generally goes unrewarded during traditional faculty evaluations. Although previous research on doctoral advising has described the experiences of students and faculty, work to improve how faculty advise doctoral students has primarily taken a unilateral approach, either focusing on positive practices for facilitating student success or strategies for enhancing faculty productivity. Little research discusses the supports that promote or the barriers that prevent faculty from developing and adopting student-centered advising practices while meeting faculty members' personal satisfaction and productivity needs. Thus, this study explores research on faculty motivation and identity regarding developing successful advising practices which create value for both faculty and students. The study seeks to address the following research questions: What advising practices do faculty members in Chemical Engineering believe are most effective when advising doctoral students? How do faculty assess the effectiveness of doctoral advising practices? The team will address these research questions by using the three C’s (make connections, create value, and curiosity) of KEEN’s Entrepreneurial Mindset, which will allow a new approach to the faculty/student mentorship experience and contribute to the other aspects of KEEN.
To identify effective doctoral advising practices and provide practical guidance and support for faculty advisors, we developed a four-part workshop series: Facilitating Engineering Faculty Success for the Chemical Engineering faculty. We focus on advising in the discipline of chemical engineering as prior work has shown that faculty advising as a practice is learned through socialization into a department and discipline. Additionally, one of the members of the research team has conducted extensive work studying chemical engineering advising from student and faculty perspectives, providing a research-based starting point. The workshop series, which includes topics and strategies pertaining to effectively identifying, onboarding, and mentoring students as well as setting graduate students up for success, was developed to coincide with a traditional advising cycle. This paper aims to discuss the process of developing the workshop series and will present initial findings from the first workshop.
The first workshop, “Facilitating Engineering Faculty Success: Effective Strategies for Mentoring Graduate Students,” was designed and executed during the Fall 2022 semester and sought to identify how faculty believe they mentor students, how faculty align their mentoring priorities with their research agenda, and to better understand how faculty define success for their students. This paper examines the discussion contributions of seven faculty participants. Emergent themes from participant conversations included: navigating and setting appropriate expectation levels for graduate students with regard to research tasks, how to address differences in perspective and goals, and how to navigate self-doubt and problems outside the traditional roles of an advisor. Faculty discussions highlighted a variety of viewpoints and levels of experience as an advisor to doctoral students. They also underline effective strategies followed during challenging stages of their mentoring.