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Abstract:
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For the past thirty-six years, the Women in Engineering Program (WIEP) has been active at Purdue University, with a focus on offering educational enhancement activities for young women interested in engineering careers. Programming includes K-12 outreach, recruiting activities, and undergraduate retention. It was recognized that female engineering graduate students also face numerous challenges throughout their studies as well; as a result, the Graduate Mentoring Program component was established in 1994. Over the past decade, the WIEP Graduate Mentoring Program has supported, encouraged, and promoted the success of graduate women engineering students at Purdue University. The objectives of the Graduate Mentoring Program are to provide support, affirmation, and information to female graduate engineering students while fostering academic goals, establishing personal connections, promoting role models, and addressing the personal aspirations of the participants. These goals are achieved within the framework of a networking mentoring model and through continuous assessment of program objectives and results. Formative and summative evaluations help the Leadership Team assess how well the program is meeting participant needs and provide valuable participant feedback. This paper will provide an overview of the structure of the Purdue University Graduate Mentoring Program, explain the mentoring model used for the program, review past successful programmatic topics, present results from the past program evaluations, and explore the participant retention and graduation data for the Graduate Mentoring Program.
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