Let's Talk about Leaving: A Special Session on Attrition and Departure from the Engineering Doctorate for Administrators, Advisors, Mentors, and Graduate Students

This special session is based on empirical findings from an ongoing NSF CAREER Grant specializing in characterizing the mechanisms of attrition for engineering doctoral students. While many researchers have characterized “what” issues can cause students to be dissatisfied, fewer are working to understand how factors layer for individual students under individual conditions. Further, many faculty hold myths of graduate engineering attrition that are incomplete or do not cover both psychological and sociological perspectives. Therefore, this special session introduces graduate engineering attrition through the lenses of both theory and composite narratives constructed from the interviews we have conducted as part of this study. The special session is aimed at multiple stakeholders, and after the interactive session, participants will leave with access to resources and materials that will be useful to talk about leaving in productive and healthful ways than is typically common with the goal of reducing stigma and promoting the education for graduate students.