“If These Women Can Do It, I Can Do It, Too”: Building Women Engineering Leaders through Graduate Peer Mentoring

Abstract

To address the dropoff of women in engineering at the graduate level, the Women in Science and Engineering (WiSE) program at Syracuse University collaborated with the Graduate School and Colleges of Engineering and Computer Science and Arts and Sciences to create a program for women graduate students in science and engineering. This paper provides an overview of available data on women in engineering and of the barriers they encounter. It then discusses the authors’ experiences with the WiSE Future Professionals Program (WiSE-FPP). Assessment data showed that WiSE-FPP provided a strong peer support network for program participants and gave the women an opportunity to engage with other women in STEM going through the same experiences. The peer mentoring offered by the program helped address barriers of isolation and the lack of successful women role models at the graduate level.