2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The purpose of this full research paper is to investigate how formal (e.g., faculty) and informal mentors (e.g., siblings) influence undergraduate students' well-being and academic success. Mentors play a critical role in students’ lives, providing them with guidance on personal, emotional, and educational matters. In both academic and non-academic settings, these mentors can help students manage potential stressors and offer helpful recommendations that help students succeed. Our recent work suggests that emotional support is the most important type of support receive, impacting students' feelings of identity as an engineer, and further helping them succeed. Following on this work, this paper focuses on our undergraduate engineering students, their emotional well-being, and their subsequent academic outcomes by identifying who supported them as mentors, and how we can better understand how to support all undergraduate engineering students more meaningfully.

This paper employs a qualitative, narrative inquiry methodology to explore students' experiences with mentorship. Using a subset of nine narrative interviews with undergraduate engineering students at a mid-Atlantic institution where students discussed mentorship, we explored how these students interact with their different mentors. We further investigated how those relationships impacted students emotional well-being and academic outcomes. Our narrative inquiry approach allows for a rich, first-person account of student experiences, highlighting the nuances of how mentorship supports or, in some cases, hinders students' academic and personal growth. Participants in this study represent a diverse range of demographic backgrounds, including differences in race, ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic status. Through in-depth interviews, students shared stories about how they connected with their mentors, the nature of these relationships, and the emotional support they received (or lacked) as a result. These stories were then analyzed using an "analysis of narratives" methodology, which allowed us to identify recurring themes and patterns across the student experiences. These narratives provided us a lens to understand how formal and informal mentorship operated in students' lives and how it contributed to their well-being.

Our findings indicate that the individuals students see as mentors have a multifaceted impact on the students' resilience. While informal mentors offer emotional support to help students manage their challenges, and thus supplement the professional guidance they receive, formal mentors provide more structured guidance and resources. We find that students can better handle the demands of engineering education with the support of both informal and formal mentors. Beyond this finding, this article will also discuss the importance of the availability of mentors, as it is important for students to be able to regularly arrange meetings with these mentors to receive emotional reassurance when needed. Through this work we highlight how mentors play a dual role in students lives, providing educational guidance and attention to their emotional well-being. Our findings are intended to inform and advise teachers on creating a more welcoming environment for their students.