Collaborative Research: Increasing Minority Presence within Academia through Continuous Training (IMPACT)

这个扩大参与的项目利用退休教师为来自弱势群体的早期职业工程教师提供指导。导师是著名的工程教师，他们最近在佐治亚理工学院的学术生涯中取得了成功。根据他们的技术专长领域，他们与来自不同机构的早期职业教师相匹配。据信，导师可以在三个对STEM领域教师成功至关重要的特定领域为初级教师提供宣传：在技术社区内建立网络，突出和宣传初级教师的学术研究贡献，以及指导如何成功地引导他们的学术生涯。这个项目的独特之处在于，它超越了传统的指导，结合了专业的倡导，利用了退休教师在其专业社区中作为领导者所取得的高级地位。这项工作的智力价值在于它的目的是提供对利用退休教师的有效性的深入理解，这些退休教师有能力作为代表不足群体的早期职业教师的倡导者。虽然人数仍然很少，但代表性不足的群体（妇女和少数民族/种族）的成员在教师队伍中正在缓慢增长，很少有人获得高级教师地位。更传统的指导项目根据种族或性别创建指导对，认为作为少数群体的共同经历对成功的指导关系至关重要。相反，该项目将调查使用退休教师的有效性，这些教师主要是白人和男性，他们被训练成早期职业生涯中代表性不足的教师的战略倡导者。这个项目的更广泛的影响在于它能够积极地影响不同群体的早期职业教师的职业轨迹和未来的成功，目标是增加工程学院的多样性。这个项目有能力大规模复制，利用越来越多的退休教师的专业知识，使他们能够继续为他们的机构和工程学术界做出有价值的贡献。

This broadening participation project utilizes emeriti faculty to provide mentoring to early career engineering faculty who are from underrepresented populations. The mentors are renowned engineering faculty who are recently retired following successful careers in academia at the Georgia Institute of Technology. They are matched with early career faculty from various institutions based on their areas of technical expertise. It is believed that the mentors can provide advocacy for the junior faculty in three specific areas critical to the success of faculty in STEM fields: networking within the technical community, highlighting and advertising the junior faculty members' scholarly research contributions, and coaching on how to successfully navigate their academic career. This project is unique in that it goes beyond traditional mentoring, incorporating a professional advocacy piece that capitalizes on the senior standing the emeriti faculty have achieved as leaders in their professional communities.The intellectual merit of this work is in its intent to provide an in-depth understanding of the effectiveness of utilizing emeriti faculty who are equipped to serve as advocates for early career faculty who are members of underrepresented groups. While still small in numbers, members of underrepresented groups (women and ethnic/racial minorities) are slowly growing in the faculty ranks with few having attained senior faculty status. More traditional mentoring programs create mentoring pairs based on ethnicity or gender, with the thought that the shared experiences of being in the minority are essential to a successful mentoring relationship. Instead, this project will investigate the effectiveness of using emeriti faculty who are predominantly Caucasian and male, and have been trained to be strategic advocates for the early career underrepresented faculty. The broader impact of this project is in its ability to positively affect the career trajectories and future success of a diverse group of early career faculty members with the goal of increasing the diversity of engineering faculties. This project has the ability to be replicated on a large scale, utilizing the expertise of a growing population of retired faculty and enabling them to continue making valuable contributions to their institution and the engineering academic community.