2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The Increasing Minority Presence within Academia through Continuous Training at Scale (IMPACTS) mentoring program brings together Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Colorado Colorado Springs, the American Society for Engineering Education, and T-STEM External Evaluation to develop, implement, study, and evaluate an evolving mentoring model in engineering academia. The IMPACTS mentoring program is sponsored by a National Science Foundation (NSF) Broadening Participation in Engineering Track 3 award (#22-17745) and builds on the success of two prior NSF awards. The program was originally intended to be an innovative strategy to complement prevailing approaches that support career mentorship opportunities for engineering faculty of color while boosting the career longevity of emeriti faculty who served as mentors. Historically, mentees have been recruited through the Academic and Research Leadership Network, a database of minority STEM faculty, as well as the National Society of Black Engineers, the Society of Professional Hispanic Engineers, and the American Indian Science and Engineering Society. To create the mentoring matches, names of emeriti faculty are solicited from mentees, and then the program administrators contact the emeriti faculty and orient them to the program's goals. The primary goal of the mentoring program was to match emeriti faculty mentors with faculty of color mentees as they navigated the university promotion and tenure processes and established a greater professional presence in their field. Distinct from other mentoring models, this program moved beyond career development to include professional networking and advocacy by renowned emeriti faculty positioned to provide these resources and who had the flexibility, time, and desire to mentor faculty of color.

The current iteration of the IMPACTS mentoring program also includes white women engineering faculty as mentees. With the evolution of the mentoring model expanding to white women, the purpose of this ASEE NSF Grantee Poster is to report insights with a subset of past IMPACTS participants on the efficacy of this evolution. An instrumental case study design (Stake, 1995) was utilized, and inductive data analysis strategies (Silverman, 2019) were employed with the eight interviews conducted. Findings reveal three themes: (1) a great need exists for the mentorship of women faculty in male-dominated disciplinary fields; (2) including white women as mentees may overshadow the mentoring needs of faculty of color; and (3) the mentoring needs of women of color may be marginalized with the inclusion of white women. The findings indicate while including white women in the IMPACTS mentoring program potentially broadens the success and impact of this evolving model, it may negatively affect the mentoring experience of faculty of color, particularly women of color.