The National Center for Infrastructure Transformation (NCIT) is a consortium of universities that includes Prairie View A&M University (the lead institution), Arizona State University, Blinn Community College, Michigan State University, Rutgers University, and Texas A&M University to improve the durability and extend the life of the US transportation infrastructure.
The Leadership through Mentoring is offered to selected graduate students and undergraduate students at each university who are participating in the NCIT research there.
The goal of the NCIT Leadership through Mentoring programming is for graduate and undergraduate students to learn how to diversify their participation in leadership processes beyond the hierarchical leader-follower construct. This effort focuses on understanding leadership as a ubiquitous and ever-present social process of influence within groups that is necessary for working in the transportation industry because transportation industry professionals need a broad array of leadership competencies to engage with multiple simultaneous complex projects responding to communities changing regional needs, climate change, or remediating past highway projects that harmed historical marginalized communities. Graduate students and undergraduate students apply together for this semester-long collaboration and those undergraduates selected receive a stipend. This structured mentorship process emphasizes shared leadership actions that are distinct from hierarchical leading actions.
A mentorship coordinator at each institution supports the mentor pairs. All the mentors and mentees from all the partner institutions also participate in the online course that was created specifically for the NCIT by Jennifer L. S. Chandler at Arizona State University to expand their leadership knowledge and competencies. At the end of the mentorship program all participants have the opportunity to complete a short assessment of their leadership skills development and consent for those data to be used in the overall research conducted by Jennifer L. S. Chandler on leadership skill develop through mentoring experiences.
