Structuring the Mentoring Process
Mentoring can be informal, with mentors and mentees spontaneously partnering and interacting in relatively casual, unstructured ways. Mentors of graduate students and postdocs can encourage informal mentoring by having an open door policy or frequently visiting the laboratory. For faculty mentees, informal mentoring is more likely to occur in settings where mentors and mentees are geographically close and have similar work roles and research interests.1
Students and faculty from underrepresented minority groups may experience less, and less functional, mentoring than their peers.2,3,4,5 One approach to providing more equitable access to mentors is to create a formal mentoring program. Beyond facilitating mentor-mentee matching, these programs can set expectations for the relationship, train mentors/mentees for their roles, and evaluate mentorship quality and outcomes.6,7
Whether informal or facilitated by a program, all research mentoring relationships can benefit from some degree of structure. In this section we describe ways that research mentors and mentees can proactively attend to their mentoring relationships by taking steps such as the following: self-reflecting upon their “fit” as mentor and mentee, setting shared expectations and goals for the relationship, creating opportunities for regular check-ins and more in-depth discussions as the mentoring plan unfolds, and developing a framework for transitioning out of the relationship.
