General Mentorship Functions
Career/Professional Support
A mentor enhances the mentee's advancement as professionals in their desired career track.
- Sponsorship
- Exposure and Visibility
- Coaching
- Protection
- Challenging Assignments
Psychosocial Support
Mentorship is a two-way, interpersonal relationship. Part of a mentor's role is to attend to the interpersonal aspects of the mentoring relationship.
- Friendship
- Social
- Parent
- Role Model
- Counsel
- Acceptance and Confirmation
adapted from: Kram, 1985; Noe, 1988; Raggins and McFarlin, 1990.
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General Resources on Mentorship
Phases of the Mentor Relationship
- The scholarly foundations of mentorship lay in attempts to understand tools that enhance key developmental stages, both personal and professional, in corporate settings. Kram’s work has been hugely impactful for how mentorship is currently studied. In this article, Kram discusses mentorship’s career and psychosocial functions as well as a model that describes phases of mentoring relationships.
- This essay discusses plant biology-inspired practices for supporting the development of a diverse range of students, academic staff, and faculty members as researchers, scholarly thinkers, and independent practitioners. Growth-perspective relationships with plants indicate vast potential for our capacity to progressively support diverse individuals in the academy. This essay investigates effective means for planting and cultivating growth-focused mentoring and faculty development initiatives.
The Science of Effective Mentorship in STEMM
- Mentorship is a catalyst capable of unleashing one's potential for discovery, curiosity, and participation in STEMM and subsequently improving the training environment in which that STEMM potential is fostered. Mentoring relationships provide developmental spaces in which students' STEMM skills are honed and pathways into STEMM fields can be discovered. Because mentorship can be so influential in shaping the future STEMM workforce, its occurrence should not be left to chance or idiosyncratic implementation. There is a gap between what we know about effective mentoring and how it is practiced in higher education.
- The Science of Effective Mentorship in STEMM studies mentoring programs and practices at the undergraduate and graduate levels. It explores the importance of mentorship, the science of mentoring relationships, mentorship of underrepresented students in STEMM, mentorship structures and behaviors, and institutional cultures that support mentorship. This report and its complementary interactive guide present insights on effective programs and practices that can be adopted and adapted by institutions, departments, and individual faculty members.
An Investigation of the Determinants of Successful Assigned Mentoring Relationships
- To test the theories put forth by Kram, researchers sought to develop measures of mentoring functions. This study examined the influence of protege characteristics, gender composition of the mentoring relationship, the quality of the relationship, and the amount of time the protege spent with the mentor on career and psychosocial benefits gained by the protege.
Guiding the Way: Mentoring Graduate Students and Junior Faculty for Sustainable Academic Careers
- This article introduces the reader to literature, ideas, and processes the authors have used in mentoring graduate students and junior faculty of color, including women. The writing is based on an integrative review of literature engaging mentoring processes and the authors’ collective experiences as they have worked to guide members of a mentoring collective as well as domestic graduate students and junior faculty from the above populations. Goals of our mentoring efforts are to provide graduate students and junior faculty who are from U.S. cultural communities historically excluded from higher education with experiences that help them complete the PhD and develop professional academic careers that are successful and have impact in their chosen disciplinary arena. The article presents a mentoring process model that prepares individuals for professional careers that integrate the work of knowledge production in research, teaching, and service that embraces the cultural heritages of the mentees’ background.
Transforming Mentorship in STEM by Training Scientists to be Better Leaders
- Effective mentoring is a key component of academic and career success that contributes to overall measures of productivity. Mentoring relationships also play an important role in mental health and in recruiting and retaining students from groups underrepresented in STEM fields. Despite these clear and measurable benefits, faculty generally do not receive mentorship training, and feedback mechanisms and assessment to improve mentoring in academia are limited. Ineffective mentoring can negatively impact students, faculty, departments, and institutions via decreased productivity, increased stress, and the loss of valuable research products and talented personnel. Using survey results and the primary literature, we identify common behaviors of effective mentors and outline a set of mentorship best practices. We argue that these best practices, as well as the key qualities of flexibility, communication, and trust, are skills that can be taught to prospective and current faculty. We present a model and resources for mentorship training based on our research, which we successfully implemented at the University of Colorado, Boulder, with graduate students and postdocs. We conclude that such training is an important and cost-effective step toward improving mentorship in STEM fields.
Resources for Psychosocial Support Functions of Mentorship
- While emphasis is often placed on assessing students' conceptual knowledge, less has been placed on investigating affective aspects of student biology learning. In this paper, we explore self-efficacy, sense of belonging, and science identity, as well as emerging assessment tools to monitor these dimensions of students' learning.
Graduate Students of Color: Race, Racism, and Mentoring in the White Waters of Academia
- The graduate student experience, for many, can be a time of great stress, insecurity, and uncertainty. Overwhelmingly, studies verify that good mentoring is one of the best indicators of graduate student success. In this literature review, we outline in detail previous research that attest to these experiences, and pay specific attention to the experiences of students of color. In general, our read of the literature suggests that academia, in general, and sociology, in particular, does not do a good job of mentoring graduate students of color. We begin our essay with an overview of graduate student experiences. Next, we discuss the mentoring side of the equation, addressing reasons that might explain variations in how students are mentored in higher education. Finally, we end with some thoughts on what faculty and departments can do to address the inadequate mentoring of graduate students of color.
- Students from several ethnic minority groups are underrepresented in the sciences, such that minority students more frequently drop out of the scientific career path than non-minority students. Viewed from a perspective of social influence, this pattern suggests that minority students do not integrate into the scientific community at the same rate as non-minority students. Kelman (1958, 2006) describes a tripartite integration model of social influence (TIMSI) by which a person orients to a social system. To test if this model predicts integration into the scientific community, we conducted analyses of data from a national panel of minority science students. A structural equation model framework showed that self-efficacy (operationalized consistent with Kelman's 'rule-orientation') predicted student intentions to pursue a scientific career. However, when identification as a scientist and internalization of values are added to the model, self-efficacy becomes a poorer predictor of intention. Additional mediation analyses support the conclusion that while having scientific self-efficacy is important, identifying with and endorsing the values of the social system reflect a deeper integration and more durable motivation to persist as a scientist.
Resources for Career/Professional Development Support Functions of Mentorship
- This thesis describes how research experiences help develop the science identity of burgeoning scientists through the building of confidence and networks of support. These research experiences, even at the undergraduate level, can impact research participants’ decisions to pursue science and research careers, including faculty. My research questions were (1) How have research experiences developed science identification for undergraduate students, (2) How have research experiences impacted views on becoming faculty, and (3) What was the role of ethnicity in shaping science identification and views on becoming faculty? Through interviews of participants of an apprentice-based undergraduate science research program, I use a phenomenological case study approach to understand how individual experiences impacted participants’ career pursuits. This study revealed that research experiences, and the programs that support individuals in these experiences, can help program participants better understand and appreciate what it means to be faculty. These support programs also have the potential to help participants navigate other science and research career tracks and to support participants’ personal and professional identity development.
- Today's doctoral programs continue to prepare students for a traditional academic career path despite the inadequate supply of research-focused faculty positions. We advocate for a broader doctoral curriculum that prepares trainees for a wide range of science-related career paths. In support of this argument, we describe data from our survey of doctoral students in the basic biomedical sciences at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Midway through graduate training, UCSF students are already considering a broad range of career options, with one-third intending to pursue a non–research career path. To better support this branching career pipeline, we recommend that national standards for training and mentoring include emphasis on career planning and professional skills development to ensure the success of PhD-level scientists as they contribute to a broadly defined global scientific enterprise.
- Interest in faculty careers decreases as graduate training progresses; however, the process underlying career-interest formation remains poorly defined. To better understand this process and whether/how it differs across social identity (i.e., race/ethnicity, gender), we conducted focus groups with 38 biomedical scientists who received PhDs between 2006 and 2011, including 23 women and 18 individuals from underrepresented minority (URM) backgrounds. Objective performance and quality of advisor relationships were not significantly different between scientists with high versus low interest in faculty careers. Career interests were fluid and formed in environments that generally lacked structured career development. Vicarious learning shaped similar outcome expectations about academic careers for all scientists; however, women and URMs recounted additional, distinct experiences and expectations. Scientists pursuing faculty careers described personal values, which differed by social identity, as their primary driver. For scientists with low interest in faculty careers, a combination of values, shared across social identity, and structural dynamics of the biomedical workforce (e.g., job market, grant funding, postdoc pay, etc.) played determinative roles. These findings illuminate the complexity of career choice and suggest attracting the best, most diverse academic workforce requires institutional leaders and policy makers go beyond developing individual skill, attending to individuals’ values and promoting institutional and systemic reforms.
Constellations and careers: toward understanding the effects of multiple developmental relationships
- This paper examines the effects of individuals' primary and multiple developmental relationships in a longitudinal study of the careers of lawyers. By juxtaposing the effects of the primary developmental relationship with those of individuals' sets or ‘constellations’ of developmental relationships, the present study lends insight into if and when these two perspectives on mentoring yield different results regarding the effects of mentoring on protégé career outcomes. The findings from the present study show that while the quality of one's primary developer affects short-term career outcomes such as work satisfaction and intentions to remain with one's firm, it is the composition and quality of an individual's entire constellation of developmental relationships that account for long-run protégé career outcomes such as organizational retention and promotion. Further, results from the present study provide evidence that the constellation perspective explains greater variance with respect to protégé career outcomes than does the primary or more traditional perspective on mentoring. Implications for research on mentoring, developmental relationships, and careers are discussed.
- We describe here the development and validation of the Academic Career Readiness Assessment (ACRA) rubric, an instrument that was designed to provide more equity in mentoring, transparency in hiring, and accountability in training of aspiring faculty in the biomedical life sciences. We report here the results of interviews with faculty at 20 U.S. institutions that resulted in the identification of 14 qualifications and levels of achievement required for obtaining a faculty position at three groups of institutions: research intensive (R), teaching only (T), and research and teaching focused (RT). T institutions hire candidates based on teaching experience and pedagogical practices and ability to serve diverse student populations. RT institutions hire faculty on both research- and teaching-related qualifications, as well as on the ability to support students in the laboratory. R institutions hire candidates mainly on their research achievements and potential. We discuss how these hiring practices may limit the diversification of the life science academic pathway.
Tracking Career Outcomes for Postdoctoral Scholars: A Call to Action
- This Perspective reports the results of a study of postdoctoral outcomes at UCSF and suggests that the same methodology could be used to help other institutions determine where their postdoc alumni are employed, with a view to sharing this information with current and future trainees.
Career development among American biomedical postdocs
- Recent biomedical workforce policy efforts have centered on enhancing career preparation for trainees, and increasing diversity in the research workforce. Postdoctoral scientists, or postdocs, are among those most directly impacted by such initiatives, yet their career development remains understudied. This study reports results from a 2012 national survey of 1002 American biomedical postdocs. On average, postdocs reported increased knowledge about career options but lower clarity about their career goals relative to PhD entry. The majority of postdocs were offered structured career development at their postdoctoral institutions, but less than one-third received this from their graduate departments. Postdocs from all social backgrounds reported significant declines in interest in faculty careers at research-intensive universities and increased interest in non-research careers; however, there were differences in the magnitude and period of training during which these changes occurred across gender and race/ethnicity. Group differences in interest in faculty careers were explained by career interest differences formed during graduate school but not by differences in research productivity, research self-efficacy, or advisor relationships. These findings point to the need for enhanced career development earlier in the training process, and interventions sensitive to distinctive patterns of interest development across social identity groups.
Yearly Planning Meetings: Individualized Development Plans Aren’t Just More Paperwork
- The National Institutes of Health (NIH) encourages trainees to make Individualized Development Plans to help them prepare for academic and nonacademic careers. We describe our approach to building an Individualized Development Plan, the reasons we find them useful and empowering for both PIs and trainees, and resources to help other labs implement them constructively.
A Social Cognitive View of Career Development and Counseling
- Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT) is a fairly recent approach to understanding the career puzzle. It is intended to offer a unifying framework for bringing together common pieces, or elements, identified by previous career theorists and arranging them into a novel rendering of how people (1) develop vocational interests, (2) make (and remake) occupational choices, and (3) achieve varying levels of career success and stability. The primary foundation for this approach lies in Bandura's (1986) general social cognitive theory, which emphasizes the complex ways in which people, their behavior, and environments mutually influence one another. Taking its cue from Bandura's theory, SCCT highlights people's capacity to direct their own vocational behavior (human agency)--to assemble their own puzzle, so to speak--yet it also acknowledges the many personal and environmental influences (e.g., sociostructural barriers and supports, culture, disability status) that serve to strengthen, weaken, or, in some cases, even override human agency in career development.
updated September 22, 2020
