Mentoring engineering students: Turning pebbles into diamonds

Journal of Engineering Education, Jul 2001 by Vesilind, P Aarne

Mentoring Engineering Students: Turning Pebbles into Diamonds*

ABSTRACT

Mentoring differs from advising in that a personal relationship is established between the student and the professor, and this relationship may last for many years after the student's graduation. Very often it is difficult to define both what mentoring is and how a professor can become a good mentor to students. This paper describes some attributes of mentoring and suggests how one might become a good mentor to students.

I. INTRODUCTION

May Sarton, in her book The Small Room, observes that "The relation between student and teacher must be about the most complex and ill-defined there is."1 Sarton's experience was in a small undergraduate liberal arts college, but I have no doubt the same observation applies to the relationship between engineering students and their professors.

Engineering faculty have many types of interactions with students. They appear in class as the purveyors of information and the facilitators of learning, and they act as advisors, guiding the students through their years of education. In some cases, the relationship between student and professor evolves into one of mentoring-which is the topic of this paper.

It is difficult to define the relationship between a mentor and a protege. Mentoring is not just advising, for example, although advising is certainly part of mentoring. Mentoring is also not paternalism. Paternalism refers to a relationship between unequal parties where the "parent" imposes his or her will on the "child" because the parent supposedly knows far better what is to the child's benefit. Although mentoring has been sometimes defined as paternalism, this is an inaccurate characterization because the relationship between mentor and protege is a voluntary one-- either party can disengage at any time-unlike the parent/child relationship.2

But if mentoring is not a paternalistic relationship, what is it? A due might be found in the origin of the word. The name "mentor" comes to us from Homer's epic the Odyssey. The goddess Athena, worried about the state of Odysseus' household, disguises herself as his trusted friend Mentor in order to advise his son Telemachus. Most likely then, the translation of"mentor" from classical Greek is closest in meaning to "advisor" in English. But the modern meaning of mentoring is more complex.

If we search for analogies, the coach/players relationship might be a model, The coach and players all work hard, and the coach succeeds when the players win. Or perhaps the mentor/protege relationship is more like a master craftsman/apprentice relationship, where the craftsman, if the apprenticeship is successful, has helped to produce another craftsman who would be competitive in the skill of the craft.

There is something mysterious about this process of intentionally creating competition. Social Darwinism would suggest that the master would have no economic advantage in passing on the secrets of the craft. There are in fact a few cases in history where professionals have been loath to pass on their knowledge. Perhaps the most notorious case occurred in the 1600's when two brothers, both named Peter Chamberlen, attained a reputation for being able to assist women in difficult labor. Their services were sought by the rich and powerful, and they amassed great personal wealth. Because they insisted on performing the operations unassisted, rumors developed that they were in possession of a secret that greatly facilitated childbirth. In fact, the secret that the Chamberlens refused to share was that of the obstetrical forceps.

The secret continued to be jealously guarded until a son, Hugh Chamberlen, sold the secret to the Amsterdam Medical College, which sold licenses to physicians for large sums of money. Eventually two physicians at the medical college, believing that withholding such information was criminal, revealed the secret. But Chamberlen had the last laugh. The secret Hugh Chamberlen had sold was a totally worthless one half of obstetrical forceps. The unwillingness of the Chamberlens to share such knowledge with students and colleagues (even after its "sale" to the College) must have resulted in the death and suffering of countless women and infants.3

But this is a most unusual case. In perhaps millions of other mentor/protege interactions, the mentor takes joy in watching the protege succeed. Such "laying on of hands" is characteristic of the professions. Recently a group of practicing engineers, members of the local American Society of Civil Engineers chapter, met at a university. They came to the campus mostly to have a chance to get to know the students and to offer their advice and expertise in the students' professional development. I asked them during the meeting why they took time away from their jobs to volunteer to come talk to engineering students. As I suspected, they had not given this much thought. To them it was simply part of what they did as professional engineers. It's part of their heritage-the debt they pay to the people who helped them in their own path to professional engineering.