2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This practice-based case study explores—through the lens of the Community of Practice (CoP) framework—the current practices and attitudes surrounding doctoral student advising in an engineering department, contributing to the broader efforts to institute systemic changes in graduate engineering education. Graduate advising, viewed as a network of social interactions, involves faculty exchanging information and supporting each other and their students. Our study utilizes in analysis specifically the process-based definitions of CoP as the process through which a community generates, applies, and reproduces knowledge and in which an ongoing process of legitimate peripheral participation takes place. While there is not a dearth of advising relationship-focused studies, department-level advising practices are relatively underexplored. This study aims to bridge this gap by considering graduate program administrator and doctoral student perspectives on departmental practices that support advising. Our research questions investigate advising support structures, mentoring resources, feedback mechanisms, and conflict resolution processes. Our results reveal differences in emphasis in faculty and student perspectives. Faculty emphasized a decentralized advising process, relying on graduate school guidelines and sequential communication. The absence of formal requirements allows the adoption of diverse mentoring approaches and mentoring tools at the discretion of faculty members. Further, a significant challenge emerges from the lack of actionable evaluation of faculty advising competencies. In contrast, doctoral students highlighted structured onboarding, a flexible culture, reasonably abundant funding, and a need for more structured protocols to address more serious student concerns, revealing the necessity to consider departmental policies or practices that can solicit student feedback in safer ways. Both perspectives underscore the importance of feedback, but interestingly, faculty concerns about confidentiality differ from students' desire for open communication channels. Further, representing one of the major discrepancies, feedback from the doctoral student focus group participants highlighted an unfamiliarity with diversity climate surveys and how they were used and reported. This was an interesting finding considering how the department typically advocates and emphasizes the use of diversity climate surveys for feedback and information-gathering. This study contributes to the literature on graduate advising and identifies potential gaps in understanding between faculty and students, potentially highlighting misaligned expectations in advising support structures.