Talking about mentoring relationships from the perspectives of PhD students: A conceptual model developement

Throughout the history of doctoral education, mentoring relationships between doctoral students and their professors have been viewed as a critical role in facilitating students´ completion of their degrees. Regarding the importance of this relationship, this research study is concerned with the understandings of mentoring relationships among doctoral students in engineering field. The main objective is to identify the key aspects that influence mentoring relationships and answer the question: “How the role of a mentor is perceived in advanced engineering education?” Several semi-structured interviews were carried out under the postgraduate engineering programs of a Portuguese university. A descriptive qualitative methodology was used to define the characteristics of the target population considering the heterogeneity of the group (e.g. educational background, age, previous experiences, gender and longevity of mentoring relationship). It was possible to identify the motivation as the most important factor in the mentoring relationship. It is important to mention that the student´s perseverance in the work development as well as the mentor´s knowledge contribution correspond to preponderant attributes. Also, this work disclosed a conceptual model for mentoring relationship analysis considering two main categories of attributes: psychosocial and academic. From the students´ perspective, the mentors´ main relevant attributes lie on academic attributes.