Exploring a New Mentorship Model: From One-on-One to Flash Mentoring

Abstract

In Fall 2018, the University of San Diego's Shiley-Marcos School of Engineering (SMSE) launched the Industry Scholars Mentorship Program (ISMP) as a year-long program for a dozen nominated junior engineering students to develop their professional skills through industry mentorship. The program is a product of SMSE's National Science Foundation Revolutionizing Engineering Departments grant, Developing Changemaking Engineers. For the 2020-2021 cohort, we changed the program model from traditional, one-on-one paired mentorship to “flash mentorship.” In the flash mentorship model, students initiate one-time (or more, if they choose) mentorship meetings with a mentor of their choice each month. The students select their mentors from a pool of industry professionals curated from the SMSE industry advisory board, their colleagues, and select SMSE alumni. In this paper, we share our flash mentorship program structure, activities, and timeline, and report on our preliminary findings (from surveys and interviews), successes, and challenges from running the program in the hopes of making this scalable model accessible to others who may be interested in implementing it. Our salient preliminary finding is that the flash mentorship program model is effective and appealing to students; however, sustaining student engagement is a challenge.