Student-led Mentoring Program Fostering Retention of Female Undergraduate Students in STEM Fields

This paper describes the mentoring program for female students in STEM fields developed by the collegiate section of the Society of Women Engineers at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (SWE-NJIT). The uniqueness of this mentoring program stems from the fact that it has been led by students since its inception, integrates peer and professional mentors, and is rooted to the geographical area surrounding our university. We believe other universities may find this model of mentoring useful for partnering with as well as for empowering female students in the development of retention and professional growth programs geared towards them. In the second decade of the 21 century, the national average percentage of female enrollments in STEM undergraduate and graduate programs remains well below those for men, especially in fields unrelated to biological, medical, or chemical topics. Concerned by our own experience of seeing female students migrating out of some engineering majors and into less math-intensive programs, the students and faculty advisor of the collegiate section of the Society of Women Engineers at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT-SWE) decided to take steps to address the key issue of retention of women in STEM fields, with a special emphasis in engineering careers in our institute. The very broad literature on the gender gap affecting women in STEM fields shows that one of the primary reasons for the appalling statistics is the lack of a positive support system for women in STEM—references 3 through 7 in this paper are excellent reviews of the current literature relevant to our work described here. As a result, the NJIT-SWE team rapidly agreed to develop a retention program for our institute that was based on the creation of a locally rooted positive support system for female students at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT). In the definition of the optimal characteristics and format of our program, we focused on four major aspects: Student-led program. Numerous support programs have been developed by professionals for female STEM students but programs led by the students themselves are lacking. The wholehearted support given by the collegiate members of NJIT-SWE to this approach is backed up by previous studies showing that “women prefer learning experiences that they help to design, that are learner-centered, and that involve them in a community” as discussed by Reha et al. for the root cause titled ‘Instructional Strategies’.