Getting the Mentoring You Need

Among the most important professional relationships that graduate students have during their training is with their faculty mentors. Yet, regardless of your stage in graduate school, identifying and working with capstone, thesis or dissertation advisers can sometimes be unclear, confusing or anxiety provoking.

What’s more, graduate programs vary when it comes to whether they initially assign an adviser to each graduate student. A mentoring relationship can also grow organically through the courses you take with specific faculty members, by having conversations with those individuals over time about shared research interests. In addition, you can develop any number of networking interactions with professors across your university.

In this article, we’d like to share some insights to help you actively shape your working relationships with faculty members so that you get the mentoring you need—and ultimately feel supported and successful throughout your graduate career.

Advisers versus mentors. A faculty adviser generally directs you to fulfill course or career development requirements that align with your department and university policies. They point you to key texts in your field and help you identify baseline milestones that you must reach to graduate and move to your next career phase.

In contrast, a faculty mentor will dedicate more time over the long haul to learning about your motivations and passions, share insights about the norms and challenges of graduate school, and encourage you to define what success means to you. A mentor will challenge you, in healthy ways, to broaden your thinking. They may also lend an empathetic ear, recognizing you are not only a student but a whole person—for instance, a parent employed outside of the university and the like.

Can a faculty adviser also be your mentor? Absolutely. Is that always the case? No. A faculty adviser may not always be in a place to put the mentee’s needs front and center. And it’s impossible for any single person to fulfill all your distinct and diverse mentoring needs. That is why deepening your bench of mentors—actively forming your own mentoring team—is important. Some helpful resources from various sources include:

• Creating a Mentoring Team, University of California, Davis
• Graduate Student Mentoring Guide, University of Colorado
• Mentoring Tips for Graduate Students, Duke University

Types of mentors. A mentor holistically supports you in becoming your best self in graduate school. It doesn’t matter if you and your mentor have very different lives or career perspectives. If you connect with that person, and something in your interactions helps you shine more brightly, count them in your circle.

Mentors can serve as research consultants, informal career coaches and holistic guides for navigating graduate school. Faculty and nonfaculty, both in and beyond your graduate program—and in some instances from another university or career sector—are all potential mentors.

Identifying mentors who will complement your needs requires you to self-reflect first. It’s helpful to assess what you need from a potential mentor before requesting their guidance. Clearly determine your academic, professional or interpersonal growth areas that may resonate with them. It could be a shared identity, a research or laboratory interest, certain career objectives, or a worldview alignment—or any combination of them—that sets the framework for a mutually beneficial relationship. For more information, we suggest “Mapping a Mentor Roadmap and Developing a Supportive Network for Strategic Career Advancement” by Beronda Montgomery.

Expectations. When you’re unclear about the responsibilities expected of you as a graduate student advisee or research assistant, or if you aren’t sure what you can expect from a faculty mentor, consider drafting together a mentee-mentor agreement. Such an agreement encourages you and your mentor to practice mutual, clear communication and accountability. It’s also a living document that you can review and update periodically. The agreement can describe your and your mentor’s roles and tasks, the duration of the active mentorship relationship, preferred methods of communication and follow-up, how to prepare for periodic or annual progress meetings, ways to keep track of action items, and more. Here are examples that can be adapted to meet your needs.

• Working With Your Faculty Adviser, University of Washington
• Developing Shared Expectations, University of Michigan
• Examples of Mentoring Agreements, New York University
• Mentoring Compacts/Contracts Examples, University of Wisconsin

Frequency of interactions. Depending on your goals and interests, the frequency of meeting with your mentor(s) will vary. The amount of mentoring you need can also shift over time as you reach small or large milestones. You might want to check in with your mentor quickly in the hallway, have a one-hour progress meeting once a month or quarter, or conduct 30-minute check-ins every two weeks over coffee or online.

In some instances, although not all, a mentor can be your go-to person when you need to talk about a challenging life experience. They may also one of your trusted people whom you can immediately contact—within appropriate boundaries—when you need support in a crisis. Thus, it’s essential to be transparent with what you need from your mentor so that you both have a shared and clear understanding of expectations. That will lead to a more robust, collaborative and productive mentoring relationship.

Power differentials. Many faculty members strive to create an equitable and collaborative relationship with their mentees, but each situation is different. Mentors can hold various degrees of implicit and explicit power simply because of their professional status, such as whether they have tenure or not, their longevity at the university, their influence in their discipline or their privileged identity (based on race, gender, class, ability, citizenship status and so on).

If you experience misuse of power or discrimination from an adviser and decide to reach out for support, you can connect with several confidential resources. Those include trusted peers or loved ones, as well as offices on your campus that focus on student mental health services, Title IX, civil rights and campus safety, along with your university’s ombudsperson or bias incident–reporting program. In addition, the following resources may be helpful in managing conflict with your mentor:

• Navigating the Power Differential, American Psychological Association
• 10 Strategies for Managing Up, University of Washington
• Dealing With Conflict as a Graduate Student, Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology

Unfortunately, while graduate students can experience racial, gender or sex-based microaggressions or harassment from individual faculty members, these issues also occur on a structural, institutional level. In a previous “Carpe Careers” article, we asserted, “Without sustained, iterative action and change throughout our classrooms, labs, offices and campus grounds, marginalized graduate students will continue to enter learning and work environments that remain unwelcoming and unsafe.”

Students should not bear the responsibility of coping with such experiences alone. Graduate departments should actively participate in institutionwide efforts to create safer and more equitable learning and working environments for all students. That includes incorporating principles and practices for equity, justice and accountability in mentoring training for faculty members who work with graduate students. Fortunately, many faculty mentors recognize that they have not been formally trained in mentorship and are actively seeking such training and guidance from their institutions as well as organizations like the Center for the Improvement of Mentorship Experiences in Research (CIMER) and the National Research Mentorship Network (NRMN).

Finally, you are more than a graduate student—you are a whole person. So recruiting multiple mentors for your mentoring team can ensure you receive the types of holistic support that you need. Also, be aware that even with all the planning and attention that we’ve described, your attempt to build your mentoring team may not work at first. It’s perfectly acceptable to reset your expectations and approach additional mentors until you’ve built your “support bench.”

To conclude, whether you are a new or continuing graduate student, you should assess—and reassess—the types of mentoring support that you need for your career and professional development, as well as your general well-being. Your success, as a graduate student, depends upon the guidance and mentorship you receive. Good mentors have your best interest in mind; they help you to shine brighter and challenge you to expand your thinking. And for their part, most faculty find mentorship to be one of their most rewarding experiences in academe and often learn as much from their mentees as their mentees learn from them. Search for such mentors in your life!