"You're just not what they're looking for": An intersectional collaborative autoethnography exploring pathways to engineering design doctoral programs.

This research paper used a collaborative autoethnographic approach to explore the two authors' respective pathways to engineering design doctoral programs. Prior work has highlighted various ways that access to engineering graduate school is inequitable. Through our collaborative autoethnography, we investigated how existing inequities harm and impede access for students with multiple marginalized identities, such as the first author (KC), while simultaneously providing advantages to students with more privileged identities, such as the second author (RL). As part of our collaborative autoethnography, we collected personal memory data, archival data, conversational data, and reflection data. We analyzed these data using intersectionality as an analytic framework to identify specific ways that structural, disciplinary, hegemonic, and interpersonal domains of power operated within the authors' experiences and impacted their pathways to graduate school. The two authors possessed similar and comparable engineering experiences in addition to extensive interests outside of engineering. However, while RL was often viewed as credible and competent as an engineer by peers and faculty, KC consistently struggled to receive similar recognition as an engineer. The authors' different experiences reflect intersectional inequities that impacted the authors starting from early childhood. These inequities further influenced how the two authors presented themselves in their graduate school application materials and ultimately gained access to graduate school. Our findings deepen understandings of how intersectional barriers affect access to engineering graduate school for women of color and may inform mentorship approaches that attend to specific societal inequities experienced by women of color. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]