What's Trust Got to Do with It? Assessing a Research-Based Mentoring Program for Novice Engineers

While the importance of trust has largely been explored in large business organizations, little attention has been given to the role of trust in one-on-one mentoring relationships between engineers(1). Trust has been relatively understudied in academic settings, especially in mentoring relationships between undergraduate and graduate students in research laboratory settings. By assessing ways of creating and maintaining trust in engineering relationships, we will be able to create more comprehensive guidelines on building relationships through research experiences. In order to assess the level of trust in engineering relationships, and particularly in underrepresented groups of women and minorities (URMs), our research team will explore the role of trust in an established research-based mentoring program, called Your Own Research Experience at CU (YOU'RE@CU), that pairs graduate student mentors with undergraduate mentees. The YOU'RE@CU program takes place at the University of Colorado Boulder's College of Engineering and Applied Science and is in its third year of operation. The program goals include improving the retention rate of undergraduate women and URMs in engineering, increasing the undergraduate's interest in research, and preparing graduate student mentors for leadership roles in either industry or academia. The program is held during the spring semester where the undergraduate students complete a one-credit pass/fail seminar course in which they learn about a variety of research practices and opportunities, become familiar with the graduate school admission process, meet industry professionals, and tour college research laboratories hosted by faculty members. In addition to the seminar, undergraduate mentees are paired with a graduate mentor to complete a hypothesis or objective-based, level-appropriate project during the same spring semester. To gain further information on student attitudes, undergraduate students complete several surveys to gauge their excitement and interest in engineering prior to beginning their research. The students also complete a post-research survey about their experiences. The undergraduate students gain practical research experience and demonstrate their accomplishments in an end-of-semester poster presentation. Both the undergraduates and graduate mentors complete weekly qualitative reflective questions through an online process. Through both the pre- and post-surveys, as well as reflective questions posed during the semester, the research team gathered information on maintaining and creating trust in these mentoring relationships. We compared and contrasted our mentor-mentee relationship to the perceived trust model created by Mayer, Davis, and Schoorman(1). Our initial findings show that ability, benevolence, and integrity are all factors that create trust in engineering relationships. However, additional factors such as group collaboration and feelings of inclusiveness allow mentees to create a stronger level of trust in research-based relationships. By evaluating this mentoring program, we were able to gain more information on trust that can help us empower and inform the novice engineer and mentors in research-focused engineering relationships. The research results from this program can guide others as they seek to establish similar programs in mentoring and research programs addressing retention of underrepresented students in engineering.