Historically Marginalized Engineering Doctoral Students' Motivation and Socialization in Graduate Education

Doctoral education in the U.S. is essential to cultivating professionals, scientists, and researchers capable of advancing and contributing to national goals. However, the engineering field warrants diversification to respond to global, social, and demographic demands. It is necessary to support students from historically marginalized backgrounds by acknowledging their unique experiences and encouraging them to activate their agency while faculty and institutional leaders work toward dismantling systemic barriers. Such practices may aid historically marginalized students in completing their degrees which will contribute to reduced attrition rates, time to degree, and degree completion. Over the past 10 years, Blacks and African Americans, Hispanic and Latinx people, and Native Americans and Indigenous people have demonstrated steady growth in doctoral education in engineering, despite several challenges and systemic barriers encountered during their doctoral journey. Even though they are growing in the field, attrition rates, time to degree, and degree completion remain an issue. Higher education researchers, workforce stakeholders, and educational organizations have been focusing on diversifying the STEM fields. Still, little attention has focused on the psychosocial elements that influence historically marginalized doctoral students' academic journeys. For example, research shows historically marginalized doctoral students encounter various challenges in doctoral education such as isolation, tokenism, and microaggression among others. To this end, it is essential to understand historically marginalized doctoral students' motivation and experiences in doctoral engineering education to identify strategies for mitigating these challenges as well as increase degree completion and decrease the time to degree. Guided by the situated expectancy-value theory and the graduate socialization framework, this dissertation consists of two manuscripts. The first manuscript is a qualitative holistic single case study that explores Latinx students' motivations to pursue a doctoral degree in engineering by investigating the following question: What values motivate Latinx students to pursue a doctoral degree in engineering? The second manuscript applies transcendental phenomenology to explore historically marginalized engineering doctoral students' socialization experiences by considering the following question: How do historically marginalized doctoral engineering students perceive their socialization experiences? The data sources for both manuscripts consist of interviews and surveys from participants in a research boot camp conducted between 2017-2021 from a larger national science foundation (NSF) funded project named the Dissertation Institute (DI). These studies are significant because they will provide implications for students who identify as members of these populations, research, practice, and policy concerning historically marginalized doctoral students' socialization experiences in engineering. Findings from the first study revealed that Latinx student motivation to pursue and persist in engineering doctoral degrees contained different subjective task values from SEVT and was influenced by educational and research experiences, role model interactions, and socio-cultural values. The second manuscript unearthed that students' socialization occurs in progressive, sequential, and connected stages. Each stage indicates students' development, even with the possible recurrence of previous stages depending on the challenges tied to systemic issues. Both manuscripts uncovered motivation and socialization vary from person to person contemplating various dimensions, and they are interconnected and influence students' journeys. In addition, the engineering context impacts both elements with respect to funding sources, research emphasis, and the persistent White male normative culture.