Despite the fact that only roughly a third of engineering PhD earners enter academic jobs, engineering graduate programs largely provide coordinated professional development only for tenure-track roles. As shown in this study, PhD and postdoc advisors are no different. This paper presents a subset of findings from a larger study of semi-structured interviews with 20 advanced (4th+ year) PhD students and postdocs to understand how their graduate and postdoctoral experiences influenced their career interests. Ten were interested in a tenure-track faculty job and ten were not. Here, we focus on advisors providing career advice and if participants felt comfortable discussing their career plans with their advisors. All ten of the participants interested in tenure-track faculty jobs received advice from their advisors–often, quite extensively through mock interviews and application materials feedback. In contrast, only four of the participants disinterested in tenure-track faculty jobs received any career advice from their advisors. Four participants did not feel comfortable talking with their advisors about their career interests largely because of perceptions that their advisors were unsupportive of non-tenure-track careers. Even if advisors personally lack non-academic work experience, part of inclusive mentorship is providing an environment where graduate students and postdocs feel comfortable discussing all types of career plans and helping connect mentees to helpful resources. This paper discusses how advisors can do that, as well as advice for graduate students on how to find additional mentors for career guidance.
Authors
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Gabriella Coloyan Fleming is a research scientist in Virginia Tech’s Department of Engineering Education. She holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and MS and PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. After completing her PhD in the experimental characterization of the thermal properties of nanomaterials, she moved into engineering education as a researcher-practitioner. She has worked as a program manager at the University of Michigan’s Center for Engineering Diversity and Outreach, a postdoc in Mechanical Engineering at UT Austin, and the director of and research associate in the Center for Equity in Engineering at UT Austin. Her engineering education research interests include servingness in engineering; assets-based teaching and learning; natural language processing and generative AI as qualitative research methods; and graduate education, faculty hiring and retention, and career pathways.
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David Knight is a Professor in the Department of Engineering Education at Virginia Tech and also serves as Chief of Strategy in the College of Engineering and Special Assistant to the Provost. His research tends to be at the macro-scale, focused on a systems-level perspective of how engineering education can become more effective, efficient, and inclusive, and considers the intersection between policy and organizational contexts. Knight currently serves as the co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Engineering Education.
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Maura Borrego is the E.P. Schoch Professor in Engineering, Director of the Center for Engineering Education and Professor of Mechanical Engineering and STEM Education at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Borrego is a Fellow of the American Society for Engineering Education and currently serves as Senior Associate Editor for Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering. She was previously a rotating program officer at the National Science Foundation, a Vice President and member of the Board of the American Society for Engineering Education, an associate dean in the graduate school, Deputy Editor of the Journal of Engineering Education and Associate Editor for International Journal of STEM Education. Her research awards include U.S. Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), a National Science Foundation CAREER award, and two outstanding publication awards from the American Educational Research Association for her journal articles.
Note
The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on
June 22, 2025, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 25, 2025
http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4576-2490
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
[biography]