2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The purpose of this work in progress paper is to share preliminary results and lessons learned from a pilot scale graduate student mentorship program being run in the spring of 2024. A wealth of research has demonstrated that LGBTQ+ individuals in engineering face a uniquely chilly environment rife with microaggressions, hypermasculine competitiveness, assumptions of heterosexuality, and overt homophobia. These experiences lead to a myriad of academic, health, and wellness issues for students and exert a pressure for all queer individuals to pass as cisgender and heterosexual to survive in the heteronormative environment of engineering. This is particularly salient for graduate students, who are in a key stage of professional development. As these students are socialized into the norms of their chosen field, they must contend with the ways these norms can be at odds with their LGBTQ+ identity. To counter this negative climate, we turn to mentorship programs, which have been shown to be highly effective for supporting minoritized students in STEM. Despite the evidence in support of mentorship programs for minoritized students, there are few programs described that focus specifically on LGBTQ+ students, and those that are reported focus on undergraduate students. To rectify this lack of programs, this paper serves as a scaffold for others to run similar mentorship programs at their home institution. We will discuss the logistics of running this program, the challenges and lessons learned, and ways in which a larger scale program can be approached. In this paper, we will also describe the impact this program had on both a student’s identity as a research scientist, and their overall perception of the climate in the engineering school at a large southern research institution.