2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Funded through the National Science Foundation Division for Equity for Excellence in STEM, the Louis Stokes Regional Center of Excellence: Inclusive Mentoring in STEM (IM STEM) program, brings together experts dedicated to investigating successful and promising practices for inclusive STEM mentoring along several STEM pathways and in various learning environment. The Center represents a collaboration between academic institutions, Department of Energy (DoE) national laboratories, professional societies, and regional industrial partners in researching and augmenting inclusive mentoring activities for historically underrepresented minority students and students from other underserved populations.
Five institutions serve as co- principal investigators in the Center: The University of Texas at Austin, The University of Texas at El Paso, The University of Texas at San Antonio, El Paso Community College, and Colorado State University. Within the Center, three working groups established a definition for inclusive mentoring: Inclusive Mentoring is a multifaceted and reciprocal relationship in which a mentor engages a protégé(s) from diverse backgrounds to advance their goals and learn from their professional development experiences.
In addition to establishing a definition for inclusive mentoring, the Experiential Learning working group spent 2021-2022 interviewing small business and national lab leadership and Presidential Awards for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring (PAESMEM) recipients to gather an understanding of the current state of inclusive mentoring. Through these interviews the research team identified not only supports, but barriers for inclusive mentoring outside of the academic space. As a result, and in conjunction with seminal research from the National Academies, the IM STEM program identified spaces for institutions to serve as the hub of inclusive mentoring, not only for Academic spaces on campus, but spaces away from campus where current students and recent graduates enter the engineering profession. These recommendations, as well as findings from two additional working groups will be represented in our larger paper findings and respective poster.