Cultivating Future Academic Leaders: Innovative Mentorship and Leadership Interventions for Engineering Doctoral Students

This paper describes two innovative interventions for engineering PhD students from the NSF-funded PROMISE Engineering Institute Mentor Academy (PEI-MA). PEI-MA aimed to cultivate future academic leaders by training engineering PhD students in core skills related to engineering excellence and leadership. The project had two goals: designing and piloting a Leadership Model for doctoral engineering scholars that emphasizes community, skill development, and networking [1], [2]; and expanding successful Mentorship in Engineering models [3], [4]. As an addition to typical career mapping and goal-setting activities in professional development, the project features Legacy Statements and Mentor Maps as two innovative interventions to the previously studied leadership development models. Legacy Statements helped students reflect on meaning-making and see themselves as leaders as they envisioned their career paths. Legacy Statements were designed to be living documents that could evolve as students advance in their careers. The second activity involved developing Mentor Maps, which enabled students to reflect on the specific contexts where mentoring would be beneficial and to identify individuals who are currently serving or could serve as mentors in those contexts. When utilized in combination, these activities provide students with a sense of their multi-generational academic legacy, including their own academic lineage and the academic impact they could envision themselves having. Participants indicated that this holistic view deepened their commitment to complete their PhDs and strengthened their interest in becoming faculty members and eventually academic leaders.