The matriculation, retention, and graduation of students is a critical and ongoing effort in undergraduate engineering education. Implementing measures is vital in increasing student motivation to continue pursuing engineering and is especially important for individuals from low-income and academically talented students. At the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), our S-STEM program includes students from all six departments in the College of Engineering and includes multiple implementations such as a summer bridge program, faculty mentoring, and a service-learning project. Here, we define and implement a longitudinal Industry Mentorship (IM) program structure. While the implementation of this program is still ongoing, we present here the basic structure of the IM program, the rationale for the structure, and some preliminary results of implementation.
DOI: 10.18260/3-1-1153-36031