2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Studies on graduate education have shown that underrepresented racial and ethnic minorities (URM) finish PhDs in engineering at lesser rates and longer timeframes than their majority counterparts. While multiple interventions have been designed for students considering their decision to apply for graduate school, few focus on the transition into those doctoral programs. Graduate student development frameworks argue that it is during this initial transition into doctoral education that graduate students suffer the largest dissonance with their environment. Students typically enter the Ph.D. with misconceptions about what pursuing a doctoral degree entails. When students fail to correct these misconceptions as they progress through their programs, they are more likely to struggle and make decisions that are harmful towards their degree progress, and ultimately, they are less likely to finish their degree. Our prior research has shown these findings to be present and latent in the experiences of URM students in engineering doctoral programs.

To prepare URM doctoral students for this transition into the Ph.D., we developed the Rising Doctoral Institute (RDI). The RDI is a workshop directed to incoming doctoral students who identify as underrepresented in engineering; students participate in the workshop a few weeks before joining their graduate programs in the Fall semester. The RDI curriculum is informed by research into the experiences of advanced graduate students, who have identified topics and strategies that could have been helpful to their specific needs earlier in their degree. The sessions include topics crucial to participants’ success in graduate school, such as time management, advisor-advisee relationships, building the dissertation committee, and managing their funding. Following the workshop, students hold monthly meetups with their peers and a mentor through the first year in their doctoral pursuit. These meetings allow us to explore how the students experience key elements to their socialization into their disciplines during their first year. As such, the RDI aims to build a network that can help successfully transition into their Ph.D. and maintain degree progress throughout their studies.

This poster presentation aims to discuss the process of the design of the RDI, its implementation across five U.S. institutions, and our initial research findings regarding doctoral student development. We share findings from pre/post-surveys, longitudinal focus groups, and individual interviews to show insights into the transition students face when entering the engineering PhD. The rich dataset will aid in the understanding of URM students’ transition to the Ph.D. process. In this poster, we present a summary of our efforts and discuss our plans to help more institutions adopt the RDI as part of their incoming student orientations.