2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The purpose of this research full paper is to understand the ways by which engineering master’s students navigate the one of most critical part of their programs: matching with a research advisor. While there have been many recent studies exploring the experiences of graduate engineering students, very few studies have focused on the first years of graduate school as a particularly difficult time of transition for new graduate students. Further, very little work explores the specific experiences of master’s students, who only have two years (typically) to become acculturated to graduate school, perform master’s level research, accomplish coursework objectives, write a thesis, and obtain a position. This accelerated timeframe lends itself to an amplified need for a smooth transition into graduate school. This study, framed through Neufeld’s Engagement Model of Person-Environment Interaction, explores the experiences of five engineering master’s students using qualitative thematic analysis to show how students conceptualize and navigate the advisor-matching process through the lens of “negotiation”—one of the key elements of Person-Environment Interaction theory. Results show how the respective goals of master’s students and their environment are mis-aligned such that even in successful-matching with an advisor, environmental barriers impede the process leading to potentially-lasting negative outcomes. These negative outcomes include degraded participation within the environment and negative evaluations of the self (e.g. imposterism) and the environment (e.g. mistrust).