Mentoring Engineering Graduate Students In Professional Communications:An Interdisciplinary Workshop Approach

Developing the engineering graduate student’s professional communications abilities is a critical element in the mentoring process. Excellence in communications is required for success in both academic and research engineering, yet helping graduate students acquire the necessary skills can be one of the most challenging tasks for the student’s mentor or research director. Many engineering graduate students have had little instruction or practice in writing and communicating as professionals. In addition, those whose first language is not English often need specialized instruction in writing and presenting in English. This paper describes a series of four collaborative professional communications workshops for engineering graduate students at the University of South Carolina College of Engineering and Information Technology. Each of the workshops focused on a major communications responsibility in engineering at the advanced degree level: teaching, dissertation writing, scholarly publication, and career-related communications. Each session included brief, informal presentations by engineering and communications faculty on communications principles, followed by discipline-specific small group activities for practice and discussion. Evaluations showed that graduate students found the workshops helpful. The workshops also increased dialogue among communications and engineering faculty on ways to strengthen the professional communications abilities of graduate students. This presentation includes a description and handouts on each of the four workshops, a discussion of current pedagogical theories pertinent to each topic, and suggestions for implementing the model in other institutions.