(25a) Perspective on Starting a Mentoring Program for First Year Ph.D. Students

Entering graduate school is a time of transition in many students’ lives and often correlates with students moving to a new location and removal from their support networks. A study on engineering graduate student thriving found that students who persisted in their degree may only be surviving, rather than thriving. More research is needed to understand engineering graduate students thriving, but researchers have shown that mentorship positively affects academic and learning outcomes in higher education. Providing students with mentors when they join a new department is one strategy in supporting engineering students thriving. This presentation will detail the creation of a first-year mentoring program at Carnegie Mellon University in the Department of Chemical Engineering. The conceptualization and implementation for the first year of the program. This first-year mentoring program is completely graduate student run. The goal of this presentation is to provide attendees with a perspective on the creation of a first-year mentoring program and in hope that others will create one in their program if one does not exist. Furthermore, this presentation will detail the iteration that occurred over the past three years. At the end of this presentation, attendees will know 1) about the importance of mentorship during transitional time periods, 2) strategies for starting a first year mentoring program, and 3) retrospective analysis on changes that would have been made earlier.