Mentoring is a full contact activity in engineering education

Abstract

San Antonio College located in San Antonio, Texas is an urban, state-supported college and the engineering program at this institution has been instrumental in providing educational opportunities for under-represented groups of minorities. In a society that becomes more and more dependent on technology the engineering schools must be focused on providing a strong education to students in technical fields. Our college takes this issue seriously by providing students with a very strong foundation of engineering education that allows them to transfer successfully to any four-year engineering programs. Engineering students in an academic setting do not have the environment, the responsibilities, the demands, or the interactions with other members of an engineering team, nor do they face the real-life situations and challenges that a practicing engineer faces every day. Therefore, our program decided that our mentorship initiative must have as many professional engineering aspects as academic ones. We built the mentoring role to be part coach, which is preparing students for their big game after graduation, part advisor, which will help them choose the right courses for their career path, part trainer, which is meant to improve their skills, part counselor, which will help them in hard times, part cheerleader, to celebrate their successes and, above everything else, to be a role model. since most of our students transfer to the engineering program at University of Texas at San Antonio, it would be extremely beneficial to observe how the mentoring helps the transfer student succeed at a four years institution. The paper will present the details, the actions, and the results of this initiative as a work in progress that is continuously adapting and improving as required by the new generations of students arriving at San Antonio College.