2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This is a work in progress. It is common for higher education institutions to implement mentoring programs for their undergraduate students to aid in their transition to college. This transition may involve things like starting an in-residence education away from home, building a professional identity, the attainment of new academic goals and growing a professional network. These could be critical aspects for first-generation students, and overall, in STEM-related careers, where minorities are usually underrepresented. However, there are still important challenges related to the implementation and creation of institutional mentoring programs for undergraduate students in engineering. One roadblock is the potential lack of participation of faculty and students in formally implemented programs. This paper proposes a methodology for the early involvement of faculty, students, and academic advisors by showcasing their experience in the redesign of the undergraduate mentoring program in an R1 university in the US. We are using a participatory design approach to get staff and students involved early and become partners in the construction and delivery of a renewed mentoring initiative. In the first stage, we are collecting evidence using open-ended interviews and participatory design workshops with faculty, students, and staff to understand the local culture around mentoring, perceptions about mentoring, and barriers to success. We are analyzing this data using Grounded Theory. Our preliminary findings help us to have an understanding of how mentoring takes place contextually in our institution and how it relates to existing theoretical frameworks. In addition, our participatory methods may help other institutions in seeing students, faculty, and academic advisors as partners, and in deploying participatory methods to create engaging programs in different areas of academic life.