Collaborative Research: Increasing Minority Presence within Academia through Continuous Training (IMPACT)

University Of Colorado At Colorado Springs, Colorado Springs CO

Investigators

Abstract

This broadening participation project utilizes emeriti faculty to provide mentoring to early career engineering faculty who are from underrepresented populations. The mentors are renowned engineering faculty who are recently retired following successful careers in academia at the Georgia Institute of Technology. They are matched with early career faculty from various institutions based on their areas of technical expertise. It is believed that the mentors can provide advocacy for the junior faculty in three specific areas critical to the success of faculty in STEM fields: networking within the technical community, highlighting and advertising the junior faculty members' scholarly research contributions, and coaching on how to successfully navigate their academic career. This project is unique in that it goes beyond traditional mentoring, incorporating a professional advocacy piece that capitalizes on the senior standing the emeriti faculty have achieved as leaders in their professional communities. The intellectual merit of this work is in its intent to provide an in-depth understanding of the effectiveness of utilizing emeriti faculty who are equipped to serve as advocates for early career faculty who are members of underrepresented groups. While still small in numbers, members of underrepresented groups (women and ethnic/racial minorities) are slowly growing in the faculty ranks with few having attained senior faculty status. More traditional mentoring programs create mentoring pairs based on ethnicity or gender, with the thought that the shared experiences of being in the minority are essential to a successful mentoring relationship. Instead, this project will investigate the effectiveness of using emeriti faculty who are predominantly Caucasian and male, and have been trained to be strategic advocates for the early career underrepresented faculty. The broader impact of this project is in its ability to positively affect the career trajectories and future success of a diverse group of early career faculty members with the goal of increasing the diversity of engineering faculties. This project has the ability to be replicated on a large scale, utilizing the expertise of a growing population of retired faculty and enabling them to continue making valuable contributions to their institution and the engineering academic community.