Work-In-Progress: Mentoring and motivating first generation undergraduate students in engineering to conduct research and persist in STEM

Abstract This Work in Progress (WIP) paper aimed to create a pipeline for first generation undergraduate students to pursue a graduate STEM degree. The program is expected to increase participation in graduate enrollment among first-generation students and to motivate them to persist in STEM fields by conducting research. The students in the proposed undergraduate research program were recruited from student organizations and success programs at the University of Texas at Austin that predominately target first-generation and/or socioeconomically disadvantaged students. The program bookends the research experience with a lecture series at the start and a research conference at the end. The lectures are an instructional component designed to provide students with the skills to write a research question, create effective search strings, and communicate technical subject matter. The lecture series springboards students into a research experience where they are matched with a graduate student or faculty member that will mentor them on their research. Thus, this work also aims to encourage community-based participation by involving members of the campus community as mentors in the student research experience. The program ended by giving students the opportunity to attend and present their work in a poster session at an annual on-campus research conference or to their mentor. Several pre- and post-attitudinal surveys were used to evaluate the program, including the Patterns of Adaptive Learning Scales (PALS) and the Undergraduate Research Student Self-Assessment (URSSA). The results showed that student motivation toward STEM and their pursuit of graduate study decreased throughout the program despite the fact that the responses remained in the positive end of the scale. Future work will explore minimizing environmental pressures with program scheduling. Sense of belonging also showed a decrease, which was attributed to the reduced communication and lack of opportunities to meet with other students in the program. Student challenges within STEM were not affected, yet the common themes of "imposter syndrome" and "uncertainty about financial support" will be explored in future work. On the positive side, student attitudes toward STEM and their pursuit of graduate school showed a small improvement. This result is promising and corresponds to a small increase in participation among the students that completed the program. The results of the PALS and URSSA surveys further confirmed student's willingness to persist in STEM and confidence in their ability to do scholarly research.