2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Faculty advisors play an integral role in the experiences of graduate students. Advisors serve in many different capacities for doctoral students: teachers, career guides, research mentors, and more. However, especially in engineering disciplines, faculty advisors often receive little to no training on how to serve as effective mentors. The training that faculty may receive is oftentimes lacking in how to provide psychosocial support, which is an important part of developing psychological safety in a team. A psychologically safe environment is one where an individual feels safe to be themselves and take risks without fear of negative consequences. In graduate engineering education, psychologically safe research environments enable students to be creative and innovative, which is a necessary part of the research process. The impact that psychological safety has on graduate students’ work outcomes and mental health and well-being needs to be more deeply explored to best support students throughout their degree programs and beyond. Psychological safety in a graduate student-advisor relationship can have positive or negative effects on student mental health and well-being as well as learning outcomes. We posit that faculty advisors serve as a resource to students and in turn influence psychological safety in student research environments, which impacts student outcomes.

This paper is an update on an NSF RFE project started in 2023 that leverages mixed methods to combine a survey of graduate engineering students and two sets of interviews. We use Conservation of Resources theory to examine psychological safety in relationships between doctoral engineering students and their research advisor(s). We have completed data collection and begun analysis of the survey responses and the first set of interviews. The survey was completed by 469 doctoral engineering students across two R1 institutions. Results indicated that psychological safety was a mediator between mentoring skills and student mental health and well-being and work outcomes. Twenty-eight survey participants were invited to participate in explanatory interviews. Nineteen participants completed an explanatory interview during which they provided insights and additional context into answers they had provided on the survey. Participants were selected to stratify demographics and offer a broad range of advisor experiences. Interviewers provided participants with their responses to survey items and asked them why they selected the answer they did or for any examples of times when their survey response was representative or not of their overall advising relationship. Explanatory interview findings emphasized the variability of student experiences with advisor mentorship and related work outcomes.

Additional narrative interviews are currently being conducted with participants who had previously completed the survey. These narrative interviews are designed to capture specific events and stories from students about critical moments in their relationships with their advisors and how advisor actions (or inaction) in these critical moments impacted their psychological safety and work outcomes, and how these experiences changed over time. We intend to interview 10-15 participants from the larger study in Fall 2024. Collectively, these results will inform training for faculty advising graduate students to create psychologically safe environments where students will thrive.