2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The National Science Foundation’s Professional Formation of Engineers: Research Initiation in Engineering Formation (NSF PFE: RIEF) provides opportunities for experienced engineering education faculty to mentor engineering faculty new to engineering education research. Through this process, graduate students working on the RIEF project with the mentee faculty member are also indirectly mentored, which may differ from the graduate student’s dissertation focus. This additional mentorship has the potential to impact not only the graduate student, but the undergraduate students they mentor. This multi-level mentoring has not been previously examined in the context of RIEF. This can provide insights on how to mentor others at different stages of their professional careers and outside the mentor’s area of expertise.

This work examines a case study for the mentorship dynamics through the lens of a graduate student that was indirectly mentored during the RIEF grant and the experiences of learning how to conduct social science research. The RIEF project evaluated the effects of introducing augmented reality in undergraduate structural engineering classrooms. This augmented reality application required development from computer science undergraduates, who were mentored by the graduate student. While the undergraduate students were not directly part of the RIEF meetings, the graduate student’s insights on those meetings shaped how RIEF research was conducted, which created an unintentional mentoring chain from the faculty mentor to the undergraduate students.

Drawing on a retrospective autoethnography informed by meeting artifacts from the duration of the RIEF project, this work uncovered themes of graduate student positioning in RIEF projects, learning through uncertainty and growth and resilience. These themes suggest key takeaways: a) intentionally positioning graduate students to be directly mentored through RIEF and b) mentoring other students may best incorporate graduate students into RIEF and similar mentoring grants. The goal is to position graduate students as intentional, instrumental contributors to grant success and their own professional development and not accidental beneficiaries. By understanding this effect, faculty mentors can improve project structures to maximize learning and impact at every level of the mentoring chain.