NSF-funded engineering research centers (ERCs) offer opportunities for engineering graduate students to serve as mentors for summer research interns including high school students, undergraduate students, and K-14 teachers. This paper examined the experiences of 18 former graduate student mentors from six different ERCs who have started their post-graduate careers. The influence of serving as mentors on the development of their understanding of leadership, their leadership skills, and their career decision-making was examined through thematic analysis of qualitative semi-structured interviews.

The results suggest that the research mentoring experiences during their academic studies can help engineering graduate students advance their understandings of leadership and leadership skills which can, in turn, play a role in their career decisions. Notably, the mentoring experiences alone did not erase the leadership knowledge and perception gap for all participants. Leadership understanding-focused guidance and concepts need to be integrated into such experiences to extend the impact. The implications of this work for engineering education include the potential of mentoring opportunities as a practical program for developing leadership understandings and competencies for engineering graduate students.

Speaker Bio

Zhen Zhao is an engineer, educator, and communicator who has a passion for advancing engineering education and developing the future engineering workforce. Zhen is expecting to graduate with a Ph.D. degree in Engineering Education from Arizona State University in 2022. His research interests focused on the professional skills development among engineering graduate students. Zhen developed such a passion over his five years of collegiate teaching experiences over various subjects barring from computer programming to statistics, to project management. Alongside the teaching time, having degrees in computer science, software engineering and industrial engineering provides Zhen multiple perspectives in engineering curriculum design and implementation. Born and raised in one of the oldest cities in China, Zhen brings an international lens to the western dominated engineering education scholarly work. Zhen is also engaged heavily in student community service. He is currently leading the effort to establish the ASEE student chapter at ASU and has been serving as an active member of the student leadership council in the NEWT engineering research center for years.