Track 2: PROMISE Engineering Institute Mentor Academy

The PROMISE Engineering Institute – Mentoring Academy (PEI-MA) will bring the concept of an “executive leadership program” to engineering graduate students. Executive leadership programs and similarly styled forums typically include the sharing of advice from experts, discussion of challenges and strategies for success, and cultivation of peer colleague networks.

However, these coaching programs are often designed for, and offered to, career professionals who are already in leadership roles, and are on a track toward becoming executive leaders of organizations, e.g., CEOs, presidents, chancellors. The PEI-MA will bring this type of focused and impactful experience to graduate students. The program will expand executive leadership development models to offer facilitated mentoring and follow-up after the initial academy through virtual sessions and cohort-based conference experiences.

The PEI-MA will put graduate students into a leadership ecosystem early, while they are still in school, and will expose them to accomplished leaders who are already university presidents. The PEI-MA will leverage the recent successes of Black engineering deans who have become university presidents, and will utilize “dean-to-president” exemplars as distinguished speakers for the PEI-MA to encourage the students to see themselves as future engineering leaders.

The speakers will share successes, challenges, and advice for navigating the early career years of the professorial landscape and trajectories that led to tenure, leadership opportunities, deanships, and university presidencies, without ignoring cultural issues. Graduate student participants will have continued access to these presidents as short-term mentors in follow up, focused one-on-one sessions.

The presidents will connect students to resources, supporters, potential employers, and other role models. Through mentoring from peers, staff, and exemplar presidents, the project seeks to build generational engineering leadership identity among the students. The program will be designed to foster this identity, value diversity, and build a mentor network that will encourage retention and pursuit of an engineering academic career pathway.

The PEI-MA will share examples of roles and environments that provide opportunities to make strong contributions to science and technology, and leverage engineering and problem-solving skills for higher education leadership.

The PEI-MA will be a partnership between the University of California Davis (UC Davis) and the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC). UC Davis and UMBC will collaborate to pilot an engineering mentoring academy that tests a theory of change. The PEI-MA will have four activities that directly engage 24 graduate students, in cohorts of 12 per year, over a two-year period.

Ten sitting university presidents from across the U.S. will serve as mentors, and the project team of university administrators will serve as mentor-facilitators. The PEI-MA will form a mentoring network or constellation that complements the experience that graduate students have in their home academic departments. The four activities will include: 1) a 3-day workshop in California with mentor presidents and mentor facilitators, 2) follow-up, individualized virtual sessions between graduate students and mentor presidents, 3) facilitated connections at engineering conferences throughout the year, and 4) a Summer Success Institute in Maryland that invites additional graduate students from the region to learn from mentors, and build peer relationships.

The research questions will examine ways that the PEI-MA model: impacts career and leadership aspiration, forms generational engineering leadership identity, provides space to discuss difficult topics such as racism, and offers mentoring that suits the needs of students from traditionally underserved groups. The project will facilitate opportunities to cultivate future engineering professors who will have outstanding technical contributions, and consider higher education leadership.

The PEI-MA will utilize the National Academies’ report, “The Science of Effective Mentoring in STEMM,” will develop a toolkit of effective ways to establish mentoring networks, and will be designed to scale across STEM fields.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.