2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) present opportunities for social mobility of marginalized students in STEM. In the USA, Hispanic-Serving status is defined by enrollment of least 25 percent Hispanic students. As such, HSIs dedicated to increasing Hispanic representation in STEM would best serve their mission by preparing their students for longitudinal success, by focusing on educational opportunities beyond short-term retention. In other words, HSIs would best earn their status by moving beyond enrollment into true servingness.

In pursuit of servingness, a program has been developed at an HSI which is designed to prepare students for success in postgraduate studies or the workforce while equipping them with skills related to self-directed learning. In this program, participating students are financially supported as they pursue industry-valued certifications, entrepreneurship training, and design project experiences. Students explore these opportunities under the guidance of industry mentors.

The dynamics of mentorship have been well-explored in available literature, but there is a lack of characterization of servingness within a mentorship paradigm. To explore the mentorship process through a critical servingness lens, efforts were made to assess and understand mentors’ predispositions to the mentoring process. To accomplish this, we interviewed mentors before their participation in a mentoring training workshop. We interviewed 5 industry mentors using a semi structure qualitative interview focused on their experiences with mentoring, and ideas on how to support marginalized students. Data analysis was performed through reflexive thematic analysis via inductive and deductive coding. Deductive coding follows the recommendations/findings of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on effective mentoring in STEMM. Preliminary results indicate that because students are expected to be self-directed in the project, they should also be self-directed in the mentor-mentee relationship. This framing overestimates student’s cultural capital within a marginalized experience. Moreover, mentors acknowledge the effects of systemic racism and other forms of oppression on the experiences of their mentees, but frequently feel ill-equipped to help students navigate that oppression. As we characterize the mentors’ approach to and conception of mentorship before exposure to the workshop, we reveal opportunities to build structures of servingness within the mentoring training process.