The Role of Mentoring in a Dual-Mentored Scalable CS Research Program

Despite the documented importance of mentoring in undergraduate research, few studies examine how students-especially early undergraduates in computing-perceive their relationships with their mentors. We present a qualitative thematic analysis of the mentoring practices used in an inclusive, structured computer science research program targeting second-year undergraduates across two large public research universities in the United States. Uniquely in this program, students had two mentoring sources: a technical mentor for each research group and a graduate student mentor common to all groups. We analyzed reflections on mentoring from 64 undergraduate researchers at two points in the program. We compared the roles of the two mentors, characterized students' perceptions of both successful and unsuccessful mentors, and examined how mentoring relationships evolved. Generally, students valued mentors who provided project guidance or technical support and who were perceived to be friendly. We found that the roles of the two mentors were complementary in sometimes surprising ways. Overall, our analysis confirms prior work on undergraduate research mentoring, and provides new insights into the unique benefits of a dual-mentoring approach and how to best support early undergraduate computing researchers.