Science and engineering are increasingly multidisciplinary. Many researchers encounter career challenges when adopting methods from fields outside their formal training. For example, faculty who shift disciplines need to acquire new skills while fulfilling their mentoring responsibilities to students who join them in the new field. We used collaborative autoethnography to study a tripartite mentoring relationship between an experienced engineering education researcher and two novice education researchers who have backgrounds in engineering—a biomedical engineering faculty member and graduate student. Using data from written reflections and interviews, we explored the role of instrumental and psychosocial supports in our mentoring relationship. We noted how elements of cognitive apprenticeship such as scaffolding and gradual fading of instrumental supports helped novices learn qualitative research skills that differed drastically from their biomedical engineering research expertise. While our mentoring relationship was overall very positive, it has included many moments of miscommunication and misunderstanding. We draw on Lent and Lopez’s idea of relation-inferred self-efficacy to explain some of these missed opportunities for communication and understanding. Our initial mentoring model failed to consider how challenging it is for mentees to make the paradigm shift from technical engineering to social science research and how that would affect a faculty member’s ability to mentor students in a new field. Our experiences have implications for expanding research capacity because they raise practical and conceptual issues for experienced and novice researchers to consider as they form mentoring relationships.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH: Dr. Paul Jensen an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Michigan, where he mentors students in systems microbiology, artificial intelligence, and automated science. Paul trained as an engineer and microbiologist at the University of Minnesota, the University of Virginia, and Boston College. He is an ASQ Certified Quality Engineer and co-founder of the biotech company Cerillo, Inc. In 2020, Paul received the Stanley H. Pierce Faculty Award for developing empathetic student-faculty relationships.