Ethical Practices and Tips for Improving Engineering Faculty-Student Research Relationships

Ethical mentoring is a relatively new term in engineering that describes the dual relationship that both an advisor and an advisee should have for each other during an intersectional time in their engineering education or profession. Ethical mentoring has several principles-beneficence, nonmaleficence, autonomy, fidelity, fairness, and privacy-principles to ensure that research relationships are effective and mutually beneficial. In a prior qualitative study, led by the author, a group of graduate student mentees and faculty mentors in science and engineering were interviewed around the six ethical mentoring principles. Out of this analysis, three key themes emerged: (a) power; (b) awareness; and (c) communication around implicit expectations within the research culture. While some recommendations around ethical mentoring were provided from that study, no comparisons were made to ethical practices of engineers (i.e., NSPE). This research-to-practice paper expands upon prior findings on ethical mentoring and compares them against NSPE. From this comparison, practices in the form of recommendations, tips, and resources were derived. While not comprehensive, the practices included aims to improve engineering mentoring relationships to support mentees towards their transition to the workforce.