Understanding the Social Exchange Qualities of Equity-Minded Stage-Ahead Mentorship in STEMM

• In Event: Navigating Identity, Inclusion, and Equity in STEM

Abstract

Using a conceptual lens of social exchange and equity-minded mentoring, this qualitative study explores how STEMM graduate students come to and navigate their roles as “stage-ahead” mentors to undergraduates, who are one “stage” behind at their institution. Motivated by ongoing structural inequities and increased graduate student labor during undergraduate enrollment growth in computing fields, specifically, I examine how 10 computing graduate students make meaning of their motivations, benefits, and challenges in being stage-ahead mentors. Findings leverage visual and interview data to illustrate how stage-ahead mentors grapple with perceived gains and drawbacks to interacting in graduate-undergraduate mentorship, as a form of social exchange, and highlight how such interactions are shaped by mentors’ identity-based experiences and unclear roles/boundaries in graduate education.

Authors

• Annie M. Wofford, Florida State University

• Holly Henning, Florida State University