Engineering students' visual metaphors for mentorship: Implications for the candidacy period

Mentorship is important to engineering activity. Yet, little attention is paid to this process within the engineering domain. This paper seeks to remedy this by analyzing the metaphors for mentorship produced by engineering students employed to work as mentors to young adults tasked with training residents in their communities regarding specific digital skills. Metaphors are used because they provide unique insight into the underlying conceptions that individuals hold about a topic or issue. The paper shows not only that metaphors are useful in garnering understanding as to how students conceive of the mentor-mentee relationship, but also that there is scope for using these understandings to provide more focused mentoring during their future candidacy period.