Underrepresented minorities in STEM disciplines

In the Academy and beyond, mentoring and networking relationships play a key role in career satisfaction, productivity, and advancement. This is especially true for those in early stages of their academic and professional careers, e.g. graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and junior faculty members. Mentors not only provide critical feedback on a mentee’s scholarship and research, but can also pave the way for young scholars to gain entry into established disciplinary communities. Though mentoring relationships can provide great benefits like these to young scholars, if not managed well, they can also pose significant challenges. Unfortunately, many young mentees make the mistake of treating their mentoring relationships passively, rather than pro-actively managing them to yield the greatest benefit.

In this chapter, we will advance the concept of “mentoring up”: a process by which mentees learn to pro-actively manage their mentoring relationships.  We will draw upon our research and scholarship in mentoring, career coaching and professional skill development, as well as our extensive experience working closely with those in early stages of academic and professional careers.  The concept of “mentoring up” is adapted from the business literature where Gabarro and Kotter introduced “managing up” in their classic paper in the Harvard Business Review in 1980. Though the original concept has been associated with manipulation, false flattery, or political maneuvering, we  will focus on “mentoring up” as the ability of mentees to effectively engage in and promote the ongoing two-way conversation that is the hallmark of healthy mentor-mentee relationships.

We will compare and contrast the concepts of “managing up” and “mentoring up” as we define the skills needed to pro-actively manage mentoring relationships. Although much of our experiences and scholarship have focused upon the STEMM (science, technology, engineering, math and medicine) fields, we postulate that these skills are relevant and can be easily adapted for other fields and for multiple career stages.  Our methods for teaching the core skills needed for mentoring up draw on a recently developed workshop model designed to teach these skills to mentors. This workshop model, recently demonstrated to be effective in a national randomized controlled trial, can be equally effective for teaching the skills to mentees.  Additionally, based on our work with underrepresented minority groups, we will explore some of the unique challenges faced by these mentees in their mentoring relationships and offer strategies to support their professional development.

In this chapter, the authors will present teachable skills and strategies that will empower mentees to pro-actively manage their mentoring relationships, so that they themselves will ultimately transform into effective mentors for future generations. These skills are particularly relevant today, when many students are seeking careers in a rapidly evolving landscape of employment and their mentoring needs are growing and changing. Furthermore, taking advantage of mentoring relationships is only one aspect of managing your career, and so we will contextualize these skills within the broader framework of overall career management and professional development.

This study uses case study analysis to explore the ways that Spelman College, a historically Black women’s college, promotes the attainment of African American women in STEM fields. Although limited to one institution, the findings shed light on the ways that institutional characteristics, policies, and practices may mitigate the barriers that limit attainment of African American women in STEM fields. Drawing on the findings, the
paper concludes with recommendations for improving policy and practice as well as recommendations for additional fruitful research.

The Texas A&M University System (TAMUS) received funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for a Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (LSAMP) project in 1991 as one of the six initial awardees. As part of these efforts and upon reaching eligibility, the TAMUS LSAMP applied for and received additional funding to support a Bridge to the Doctorate (BTD) program. BTD programming provides financial, educational, and social support to incoming STEM master’s degree and PhD students for the first two years of their graduate study. BTD cohorts consist of up to 12 fellows who participate in a program of academic and professional development seminars and workshops. In project evaluation, annual interviews were conducted with the TAMUS BTD participants, the vast majority of whom were underrepresented minorities (92%). During the interviews, the BTD students were asked to discuss ten topics some of which addressed concerns specific to the implementation of the BTD project. This report considers answers provided in the five topic areas which have broader applicability: 1) the learning achieved by participants through participation in BTD, 2) the personal impact of participation in BTD, 3) the influence of BTD on informants’ educational goals, 4) the influence of BTD on informants’ career goals, and 5) barriers the BTD participants perceived to pursuing a PhD. Eighty project participants responded to the questions between 2009 and 2018. They were from eight distinct cohorts of BTD students and represented 32 different areas of STEM specialization. Qualitative analysis of their responses confirmed that students perceived the elements of the TAMUS BTD project to be efficacious and that there was a set of nine seminars from which participants consistently reported benefit. Additional findings were eight key areas in which learning was reported by participants, four areas in which the programming  had personal impact, five influences on educational goals,  nine impacts on career goals, and a detailed list of barriers graduate students who are underrepresented minorities (URM) perceive to pursuing a doctoral degree. The proven and easily replicated pattern of support programming, the demonstrated results of this programming, and insight into barriers URMs perceive to pursuing a STEM doctorate are immediately applicable to URM graduate student support at many institutions of higher education.

In this collection of posters, we add to the community conversation on equity and access in making by considering the work of four UC Links sites. UC Links is a network of university-community partnerships with a long-standing focus on equity.

As part of a longitudinal research effort that examines the influence of social capital on differential persistence and retention among undergraduate engineering majors, this study examines how engineering degree-related social capital differs for first-year engineering students by gender and ethno-racial groups. Social capital is operationalized as a person’s network of relationships with individuals who hold influential positions (e.g. parent, teacher, advisers) and access to resources that support persistence in engineering programs. Our data comprise survey responses from 2186 first-year engineering students, from eleven diverse colleges and universities, who provided information about their participation in engineering-related courses, activities, and programs while in high school as well as the individuals who influenced their decision to pursue an engineering major. We found few differences in social capital between men and women, but found many differences among ethno-racial groups, which suggests that different levels of social capital could influence students’ persistence and retention.

A major goal in Engineering training in the U.S. is to continue to both grow and diversify the field. Project-and service-based forms of experiential, problem-based learning are often implemented with this as a goal, and Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS) High is one of the more well-regarded and widely implemented. Yet, the evidence based on if and how participation in such programs shapes student intentions and commitment to STEM pathways is currently limited, most especially for pre-college programming. This study asks: How do high school students' engineering mindsets and their views of engineering/engineers change as they participate in project-service learning (as implemented through an EPICS High curriculum)? This study employed a mixed method design, combining pre-and post-test survey data that were collected from 259 matched students (63% minority, 43% women) enrolling in EPICS High (total of 536 completed pre-tests, 375 completed post-tests) alongside systematic ethnographic analysis of participant observation data conducted in the same 13 socioeconomically diverse schools over a two-year period. Statistical analyses showed that participants score highly on engineering-related concepts and attitudes at both pre-and post-test. These did not change significantly as a result of participation. However, we detected nuanced but potentially important changes in student perspectives and meaning, such as shifting perceptions of engineering and gaining key transversal skills. The value of participation to participants was connected to changes in the meaning of commitments to pursue engineering/STEM.

As part of a longitudinal research effort that examines the influence of social capital on differential persistence and retention among undergraduate engineering majors, this study examines how engineering degree-related social capital differs for first-year engineering students by gender and ethno-racial groups. Social capital is operationalized as a person’s network of relationships with individuals who hold influential positions (e.g. parent, teacher, advisers) and access to resources that support persistence in engineering programs. Our data comprise survey responses from 2186 first-year engineering students, from eleven diverse colleges and universities, who provided information about their participation in engineering-related courses, activities, and programs while in high school as well as the individuals who influenced their decision to pursue an engineering major. We found few differences in social capital between men and women, but found many differences among ethno-racial groups, which suggests that different levels of social capital could influence students’ persistence and retention.

In this paper we propose a new vision of educational development that reimagines how graduate instructors are socialized and professionalized in academic settings. We describe a Transgressive Learning Community (TLC) that empowers graduate instructors with tools to reveal, mitigate, and disrupt oppressive structures in higher education. Our learning community is founded on critical race and feminist conceptualizations of pedagogical inquiry in its design, implementation, and assessment to serve underprivileged, underserved, and historically underrepresented graduate students. We argue that the intersections of marginalized and graduate student identities create distinct experiences of discrimination, marginalization, tokenism, isolation, and impostor syndrome due to a lack of sustained teaching mentorship within the academy. The Transgressive Learning Community model that we propose in this paper functions to create spaces of transgressive and transformational pedagogical engagement for graduate students who exist at the intersections of these identities

Changing demographics of the U.S. population drive growing emphases on diversity in engineering education. Still, questions persist about the educational benefits of race and gender diversity within the student population, despite decades of supportive research. The present study sought to estimate the educational benefits that accrue to undergraduate engineering students who interact with diverse peers and perspectives. Furthermore, differences across gender and race were explored. Multi-institutional survey data were analyzed for over 100 undergraduate engineering students using a 2007 administration of the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE). Findings show that encouraging contact among students from different economic, social, or racial/ethnic backgrounds can produce greater perceived learning gains amongst engineering students.