2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Work in Progress: for engineering students and working engineers, there are many benefits to both being a mentor and receiving mentoring. Many universities lack a structured mechanism to assign mentors to engineering students. A large part of mentoring is giving feedback, both positive (things done well) and negative (things that should be improved). While experienced engineers are often encouraged to mentor less experienced engineers, they rarely receive instruction or guidance on how to be effective mentors or provide substantive and balanced feedback while they are in school. This work in progress reports on the beginning of an initiative to increase feedback to first-year engineering students while also giving fourth-year engineering students the opportunity to practice giving feedback and their mentoring skills.

First-year engineering students are often asked to work through the engineering design process officially for the first time in their lives. The instructor may provide a design challenge and the steps of the process through which design teams must work. The instructor may provide tools and tips and offer academic support and feedback. This project seeks to further scaffold the first-year students’ experience by pairing the first-year design teams with fourth-year student mentors. The goals are to provide a meaningful experience for both the first and fourth-year student teams, scaffold the first-year design process with the experienced student perspective, and increase general retention in engineering in undergraduate education.

In the initial efforts at Penn State Brandywine, Cornerstone Engineering Design class teams, primarily first-year students, were mentored by Capstone teams, primarily fourth-year students, all of whom have taken the Cornerstone Engineering Design class. The Capstone teams provided support and feedback to the first-year students at four points along their engineering design process journey: empathy-focused research, concept design, prototyping, and presentation. The Capstone teams made an effort to provide substantive and constructive feedback to the design teams throughout the process. At the end of the semester, the first-year students were asked about their experience with the Capstone mentors and reported that the fourth-year students offered valuable insights about the designs themselves as well as useful guidance on the process.

In future semesters, first- and fourth-year students will be surveyed at the beginning and the end of the semester, pre- and post-mentoring, to gather information on the experience of having an experienced student mentor through the design process. Results will be available in the Spring of 2025; these results will allow us to further refine the process to eliminate variables that may be affecting outcomes. An effort will be made to gather additional data about the longer-term impact of having had this relationship between first- and fourth-year students.