2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The purpose of this work is to explore the development of structured summer internships targeted toward an emergent and resilient workforce. This works in progress paper is based on multi-year, mixed methods external evaluation studies of mentored research experiences for undergraduate students (REU). These mentored research experiences take place at a shared engineering school (i.e., a Public University and a Historically Black University (HBCU)) workspace. The objective of the REU is to increase the STEM workforce by addressing the challenges faced by underrepresented student groups. These student groups are often identified in previous STEM education reports as facing many challenges that result in incompletion or discontinuance of STEM degrees/pathways. We aim to explore the development of the REU summer internships that are structured to address such challenges using multi-year data collected from the intentionally shared and diverse REU cohorts. Research data from surveys and individual focus group interviews from sixty plus students that have participated in mentored research experiences for undergraduate students across multi-year cohorts to date have been analyzed. We find evidence that the unique structure of these intentionally shared and supportive research experiences addresses many of the challenges to the retention of underrepresented STEM students and can therefore be used to inform retention strategies for historically underrepresented students in STEM programs. Implications are offered with respect to consistent and increased retention as well as the matriculation of these students into the STEM workforce.