Growing Graduate Mentors Through a Summer Intensive Research Institute

Graduate student mentors play a crucial role in engineering research and education. To illustrate, they are often called upon to assist faculty and programming with various tasks such as training and supervising mentees, organizing activities, and managing programmatic logistics. Although graduate students frequently serve as mentors, especially in programs that serve undergraduates, few studies have explored their perspectives on mentoring or how these beliefs translate into their mentoring practices. This is our focus in this paper. Specifically, we draw on data from a larger NSF project and qualitative interviews with five graduate student mentors about their mentoring experiences in a summer intensive research institute (SIRI). Results show that graduate student mentors in SIRI utilized culturally responsive approaches to frame their thinking about mentoring and drew on their awareness of intersecting identities as presented in the Academic Wheel of Privilege (AWoP) to promote empathy, perspective-taking, and greater social sensibilities among the students they mentored, especially in mentoring students from historically underrepresented and marginalized groups. Finally, we discuss the implications these findings have for preparing graduate students to mentor in higher education settings.