Understanding what motivates students to enroll, persist, and complete an undergraduate research experience is crucial in developing strategies for creating well-rounded and inclusive research programs. This paper showcases an approach for a virtual undergraduate research onboarding program to orient engineering students to the National Science Foundation (NSF) Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU). A participatory action research strategy, photovoice, was used to identify factors influencing student motivation, satisfaction, and success for a virtual research onboarding program. Although photovoice has been used as an assessment tool in various educational settings, to our knowledge, it has not been used to evaluate virtual undergraduate research onboarding programs to promote retention of historically underrepresented students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). The exploratory findings of this study reinforce best practices for formal face-to-face onboarding programs, offer new insights for informal virtual programs, and provide an approach to program assessment with recommendations for developing impactful onboarding experiences for student enrollment, persistence, and completion.