2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Peer Mentorship in a Virtual University Setting: A Hispanic Perspective on How Mentorship Broadens Participation in Advanced Degrees

Presented at Peer Mentorship, Cross-Race Mentoring Relationships, Race, Gender, Student Success, and Career Outcomes

Mentorship is crucial in providing a platform for academic and leadership development and success among underrepresented groups in STEM. Studies on mentoring students from underrepresented groups in STEM demonstrate the characteristics of strong peer relationships, superior communication skills, and favorable academic and career development factors toward starting careers in engineering at undergraduate and advanced degree levels. Despite knowing these factors in academic and professional success from interactions with professors and academic advisors, we posit that having graduate students promote the pursuit of advanced degrees to undergraduate students can support underrepresented populations to pursue graduate-level degrees and start their careers at more advanced levels. We extend these insights by analyzing factors that enable successful mentoring towards increasing Hispanic representation in graduate school with a hybrid mentorship program.

To foster belonging in engineering, our program brings together graduate students and undergraduates that identify as Hispanic or Latin American. We hosted workshops to enhance mentoring participation with topics such as the importance of mentoring, leadership skills development, and career pathway expectations. Social events were also included to build community among participants, and we invited speakers who identified as Hispanic or Latin American and held a graduate degree. Participants were also given the flexibility to meet on their own virtually or in person.

During the program's first iteration, we recruited 12 graduate student mentors to pair with 12 undergraduate students from various departments in the Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois. The program enabled 50% of our graduate student participants in the first cohort to obtain their first experience being a mentor. By the end of the first iteration, 91% of the graduate mentors indicated an interest in skills to perform better, as mentors were given the necessary tools to help their mentees through the process. None of the undergraduates from the first cohort were eligible to apply to graduate school as they were not graduating yet. However, two of the three senior undergraduates in an ongoing second cohort have applied to graduate programs or fellowships. Based on preliminary data, our program highlights how representation, guidance, and monitoring are crucial components for successfully boosting students' interest in graduate school participation.

Authors

Federico Cifuentes-Urtubey University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign [biography]

Federico is a Ph.D. Candidate in Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include privacy in wireless systems, network systems security, and network infrastructure design and analysis. Cifuentes-Urtubey is an Alfred P. Sloan Scholar and GEM Associate Fellow and was awarded a Grassroots Initiatives to Address Needs Together (GIANT) Grant to integrate mentoring philosophy into research supporting the Hispanic engineering community. He earned his B.S. in Computer Science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Paola A. Baldaguez Medina http://orcid.org/https://0000-0003-3080-8046 University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign [biography]

Baldaguez Medina, M.S., is a Ph.D. candidate in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (UIUC). She completed her undergraduate studies in Chemical Engineering at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez in 2019 and obtained her master's degree in Chemical Engineering at UIUC in 2022. While at UIUC, she has been a member of the Su group, where she works on water remediation using electrosorption techniques. Baldaguez Medina is an Alfred. P. Sloan scholar and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. Throughout her Ph.D., she has been very active in mentoring Hispanic students in engineering. Consequently, she was awarded a Grassroots Initiatives to Address Needs Together (GIANT) grant to help undergraduate Hispanic students pursue graduate degrees.
Julie E. Lorenzo University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign [biography]

Julie is currently a Field Engineer at M. A. Mortenson Company with 2 years of industry experience. She has earned her B.S. in Civil Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a primary in construction management and a secondary in structural engineering. She also completed her M.S. in Civil Engineering at Illinois. Throughout her academic career, she joined various registered student organizations to help support traditionally underrepresented engineering students, and she was awarded the Grassroots Initiatives to Address Needs Together (GIANT) grant to help undergraduate Hispanic students pursue graduate degrees during her graduate career.
Dr. Natasha Mamaril http://orcid.org/https://0000-0003-4883-471X University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign [biography]

Natasha Mamaril is currently the Associate Director for Undergraduate Research in The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests include academic motivation and the assessment of student learning. She has a B. S. in Chemical Engineering and obtained her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Educational Psychology from the University of Kentucky. She also has nine years of industry experience.

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