CAREER: Examining Support: The Experiences Engineering Graduate Students

About This Grant

Examining Servingness: The Experiences of Latino Engineering Graduate Students in Hispanic- Serving Institutions Latinos are projected to soon become the largest demographic group in the U.S. Our representation in engineering higher education is critical for the country’s competitiveness and will broaden our engagement in the field. To that effect, Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs) play a crucial role in serving the Latino community— yet the concept of “serving” in doctoral education at HSIs remains largely unclear. Federal designation requires only that an institution’s enrollment consists of ≥ 25% Latino full-time students, so—as Latino population demographics increase—more institutions will become HSIs. HSIs’ high graduation rates of Latinos with engineering doctorates indicate a degree of success in how these institutions support their Latino students. However, how HSIs promote doctoral students’ success in achieving degree completion has not been studied. Therefore, to better understand the role of HSIs on Latino Ph.D. success, understanding how “serving”—that is, how to support Latino graduate students beyond enrollment—is crucial. This CAREER project will lay the foundation for HSIs to effectively empower Latino students to lead research and innovation through their doctoral engineering programs. Specifically, this project will explore how Engineering HSIs directly impact the experiences of Latino graduate students in engineering. This project addresses the research question: How do HSIs’ servingness support Latino engineering doctoral students? To do so, this project will employ a multi-case study methodology using institutions as the unit of analysis to longitudinally study the experiences of Latino engineering doctoral students at two different types of engineering HSIs: the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez, a research-emerging engineering HSI, and Arizona State University, an R1 recently designated as an HSI. This project will leverage trusted site coordinators in each institution’s College of Engineering to recruit Latino engineering students in the first year of their engineering Ph.D. and follow them over a four-year period via monthly prompts to understand their Ph.D. experiences. This project will also involve graduate education stakeholders at these institutions via periodic interviews to understand the institutional factors that impact doctoral students’ experiences at their institutions. The collected data will be analyzed alongside institutional data and documents relating to the servingness efforts at each university to contextualize the participants’ perspectives. By triangulating these data sources, this work will uncover the connection between doctoral student experiences as a function of the structures for “serving.” The methods will be guided via two frameworks: (1) Garcia, Núñez, and Sansone’s framework for servingness and (2) the Graduate Student Socialization framework. Combining these two frameworks will address two vantage points in the analyses—one from the students’ development in HSIs and a second from the HSIs’ impact on students. The education plan focuses on doctoral education leaders from both institutions. Using a community of practice model, graduate associate deans, program leads, and staff will learn how institutions can serve Latino doctoral students in engineering through collaborative workshops showcasing research findings. Outcomes include a list characterizing high-impact practices articulating insights across both institutions and an established network of HSI practice-sharing. Finally, this project will develop a scoresheet to be used as a rubric by HSI leaders at other institutions to evaluate institutional structures for servingness and their impact on doctoral students. As a result, this work will help identify and disseminate best practices that HSIs and other institutions can implement to better serve Latino doctoral students. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.