Mentoring future engineers in higher education: a descriptive study using a developed conceptual framework

Abstract

Mentoring research is recent and multidisciplinary and is found in mostly English speaking cultural contexts. The purpose of this study is to describe a fifty-year old mentoring practice involving faculty-mentors and engineering student-mentees, at the school of engineering of a Spanish university, a non-English speaking context. Mentoring is part of the process of developing the career of the engineering students. For this description, we first developed a more complete conceptual framework of mentoring from literature, identifying the key elements or components. The description of each element in the mentoring practice at the study setting was obtained from archival documents, records, observations and interviews of faculty-mentors and student-mentees. The usefulness of the framework is thereby tested and areas for improvement of the mentoring practice are identified. In addition, this study extends mentoring research into the Spanish speaking European culture and highlights a mentoring experience that could be replicated in other universities. We provide a definition of mentoring that is based on the mentoring experience and practice at the institution given the lack of a generally accepted definition of mentoring.

Perception and Importance of Mentor-Mentee Programme in Indian Institute of Technology (Iit, Jodhpur) to First Year Engineering Student

“…[18] Outcomes of mentee should be • Effective and faster adjustment to institute environment • Academic performance enhancement • Acquiring more self-knowledge and self-leadership capabilities • Involvement more in cultural and social activities • And smooth transition. [19] Coaching has to be differentiated from mentoring relationship as coaching is an immediate performance-based focus whereas Mentoring relationship is one to one process which help mentee to learn, improve skills, develop and take a long term and positive view towards career of a person and success and it's an interaction between an older professional, the mentor, and a younger professional, the mentee. [20] This mentor-mentee programme has yielded many beneficial results.…”

“…One specific perception common among students is that usually faculty members are not much concerned about students, which could be due to communication barrier between faculty and students. [19] Intimate emotions are developed between mentor and mentee after personal issues and problems are discussed by mentee in a cordial atmosphere without hesitation. This level of personal contact between mentor and mentee is much closer as compared to that between student and teacher or role model.…”

Exploring Mentees’ Needs from a Mentoring Program: Towards the Development of a Mentoring Toolkit

“…Mentoring originated in Homer's Odyssey, a Greek epic in which Odysseus entrusts his son Telemachus to Mentor, a friend, to assist in the boy's upbringing while he was away at war with the city of Troy. As a result, the modern word "mentor" stems from Homer and refers to a process in which a mentor guides and protects another (Agholor et al, 2017;Gee & Popper, 2017). Since then, mentoring has been extensively studied, as shown by the abundance of research studies and popular literature available to us in recent decades (Dada, 2020).…”

Postgraduate Students’ Views on Mentoring in the Educational and Academic Context

“…The concept of mentor provokes different meanings among humans and professionals (Viorel, 2018). That's why scholars investigating mentoring use in advance specific definitions to restrict the variability among participants' perceptions, although there lies the risk of the dominance of variant researchers' perceptions over those of participants (Haggard et al, 2011) since the literature is abundant with heterogeneous definitions (Agholor et al, 2017). According to Haggard's et al (2011) comprehensive meta-analytic review, the relevant definitions have altered over the years of research and are differentiated based on the scope and type of information they contain to identify mentors and their behaviors (functions) as well as to the boundary conditions they establish or not for these issues.…”