2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Mentoring is an integral part of graduate education. Specifically, mentoring is important for advisor-advisee relationships, for continual progress in a graduate program, and for graduate students to think about their next step: achieving a fulfilling career. Mentoring has been shown to contribute to career readiness, persistence, and overall success at both the master’s and doctoral levels. In order to ensure that graduate students and postdocs feel confident in their career readiness and transitions, there is a strong need for an intentional focus connecting career development with graduate education opportunities provided by universities. While resources typically exist at the university level to support career development for undergraduate students, there is typically little intentional focus on mentoring for career development for engineering graduate students and postdoctoral scholars.

To address this gap, we developed GradBridge, a new cross-institutional initiative connecting graduate students from two large Research 1 (R1) universities through structured mentoring circles. Each mentoring circle pairs ~8 graduate student and postdoctoral mentees with 2 mentors from various engineering focused sectors, fostering conversations on professional development, career pathways, and competency-building. The program’s goals are to connect graduate students and postdocs with experienced mentors, peers, and career insights. Through interactive mentoring circles focused on career exploration and professional growth, GradBridge helps participants navigate different career paths in engineering—whether in academia, industry, government, entrepreneurship, or more.

Here, we describe the program’s design, curriculum, recruitment practices, and unique partnership between two R1 universities. We share aggregate descriptive statistics from the initial application cycle for mentees and mentors, as well as best practices and challenges faced in developing this new initiative. Finally, there will be a discussion about existing initiatives and research within the career development landscape specifically tailored for engineering graduate students and postdoctoral scholars. This Work in Progress contributes to the growing body of research on engineering graduate career development and offers a promising framework for promoting community and career readiness among engineering graduate students.