2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This empirical research paper is a work-in-progress (WIP) study to better understand graduate students’ mentoring self-efficacy. Graduate education depends on mentoring relationships that advance research while supporting graduate students’ well-being, belonging, and professional development. However, many graduate students enter these relationships with limited confidence in how to communicate effectively, provide mentorship to peers, or plan their own career paths. Commonly, this confidence in one’s mentoring relationship is referred to as mentoring self-efficacy. This study explores how participation in a holistic mentor-training program influences graduate students’ mentoring self-efficacy.

Guided by Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT), the study examines how students’ learning environments and experiences interact with self-efficacy and outcome expectations to shape mentoring behaviors. SCCT emphasizes that self-efficacy arises from both internal beliefs and external supports; in this context, holistic mentoring serves as an environmental influence that may strengthen students’ confidence in relational and professional domains.

Data are being collected through ten semi-structured interviews with graduate students who have completed at least one mentor-training module at a large public research university in the southeastern United States. These students represent a variety of disciplines and stages of graduate study. The interviews explore perceived changes in mentoring confidence, communication strategies with advisors and mentees, and connections between these experiences and students’ future professional trajectories.

Preliminary inductive thematic analysis revealed three key findings. Graduate students described an evolving sense of identity as mentors, reflecting on what it means to mentor beyond technical supervision and emphasizing empathy, communication, and psychological safety. Many also discussed how role-playing or active discussions within training sessions helped them build confidence in communicating with both advisors and mentees. Finally, participants linked these experiences to a forward-looking sense of professional self-efficacy, expressing that the mentoring skills they developed were not limited to academia but transferable to leadership, advising, and management roles in their future careers.

The next phase of this work involves completing data collection, refining the codebook through double-coding and peer debriefing, and integrating qualitative findings with ongoing quantitative measures of mentoring self-efficacy and well-being. Collectively, these results will inform the design of mentor-training programs that integrate relational, reflective, and professional dimensions of mentoring. By examining how graduate students interpret and build mentoring self-efficacy, this study contributes to understanding how holistic mentor-training interventions can cultivate inclusive, self-aware, and confident mentoring cultures in STEM graduate education.