2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

When engineering students earn an opportunity to complete an internship, they are usually assigned a mentor to guide them through their day-to-day responsibilities. Mentors may be faculty from the student’s educational institution or engineers and managers from the company where the student does their internship. Previous research on mentor perspectives on engineering internships highlights many skills students can learn from internships and the value of an internship experience. While these findings lay the foundation for mentor perspectives of engineering internships, previous research focuses mainly on faculty mentors’ perspectives. Research focusing on industry mentors’ perspectives often compares those to student perspectives and is more surface-level. The current work-in-progress (WIP) study uses qualitative interviews to gain greater insight into industry mentors’ perspectives on engineering students’ internships. The researchers of this WIP study collected interview data from 5 industry mentors of different engineering companies around the region where the university was located.
Industry mentors in the current study noted strengths in soft-skills, such as time management and communicating directly with mentors. They also noticed strengths in students’ ability to ask relevant questions. Lastly, mentors were cognizant of students’ level of education when mentoring and assigning tasks.
Connecting learning topics to industry recommendations is expected in engineering education. The current study’s findings will help engineering educators understand what skills industry mentors look for in engineering interns and potential employees. Engineering educators can then incorporate the training of these skills into their lessons.