Shedding light on important mentorship relationships issues in advanced engineering education

This research study is concerned with individual understandings of mentoring among doctoral students in engineering. In Portugal there is an increasing number of students applying for postgraduate training and search for guidance. The study expounds how this process on advanced studies is seen. To achieve this objective, perspectives on important mentoring relationships of doctoral engineering students from different years were taken. Several semistructured interviews allowed to gather evidence concerning the way in which each student recognize and perceive their own reality, providing information to enable establish relationships. The focus of these interviews was to identify how students perceived the mentoring process influence in their academic path. Topics such communication, differing expectations between mentor and mentee, trust and relational aspects were addressed. The findings of this study revealed that motivation is the most important factor in the mentoring relationship being gender the least important.