Maria Stalzer Wyant Cuzzo
CETL Summer Conversation
June 2014
The Lived Legacy of the
Now
• The Story Then: Homer, The Odyssey,
Ullysses, Mentor (Athena), Telemachus
• The Story Now: Elise Pearson Brown
• Assumptions: exposing our students to
our own interests/enthusiasms,
introducing them to larger community of
scholars and helping them with
emotional questions of this way of life
• Discussion (i): what kind of mentoring
have you experienced in your
academic career? Who was your best
mentor and what did they do? Share
with each other (5 minutes with one
partner)
• Discussion (ii): what is your philosophy
of mentoring undergraduate students?
(5 minutes with a new partner)
How to Mentor Graduate Students: A Guide for Faculty, Rackham Graduate School, p. 13
How to Mentor Graduate Students: A Guide for Faculty, Rackham Graduate School, p. 13
Content knowledge of discipline, logistical management and sense of purpose and strategy
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Mitchell Malachowski
Initiation Stage
Cultivation Stage
Transformation Stage
Separation Stage
Thinking through the commitments
• What content does mentee
need to learn?
• What methods are critical in
the field?
• How does one produce
scholarship in your discipline or
original, creative work?
• “easy one”---we all just have
to know our discipline and
know how to teach
• Mentoring involves RELATIONSHIP
• Opening yourself to form a bond
(vulnerability, risk, connection)
• Spending quality time, attention,
energy in the mentee and their success
• Sharing your own achievements and
failures so someone else can learn
from them
• Committing yourself to a long-term
relationship with your mentee
• Discussion: how do you build positive
RELATIONSHIP with your mentees?
What are the successes and challenges
you’ve faced in doing this? (3 minutes)
• Modeling involves:
• Thinking through what it means to be a
successful academic who practices their
art and science with integrity---explaining that to another
• Knowing your professional conduct
standards and expectations---teaching
that another
• Exploring the ethical dilemmas of your
field---sharing those with another
• Showing how you do your own work--opening that process to another’s view
• DISCUSSION: share one example of a
professional conduct expectation in
your discipline that you need to share
with your mentee (3 minutes)
• Explaining undergraduate
success, graduate school
potentials and career pathways
• Rendering visible the written and
unwritten rules of the game in
your discipline
• Helping mentees formulate the
right questions
• Clarifying expectations
• Discussion: what might be an
example of an “unwritten rule” in
your discipline that you could
share with mentees? (3 minutes)
• Soft toward the mentee but hard on
the evaluation for work product
(partial to student; impartial to
quality of work)
• Setting clear expectations for
projects and following through with
mentee on completion
• Helping mentees manage their time
and project focus
• Devising plans and meeting goals
• Encouraging self-direction and
personal responsibility
• Discussion: how do you practice
accountability with mentees? (3
minutes)
• Introducing them to others in
the discipline or field
• Help them connect with future
jobs or institutions
• Bringing the community into the
effort of mentoring
• Discussion: share 1-2
networking connections you
can facilitate with your
mentees in your next project?
(3 minutes)
• Get to know your mentee as a person: what are their interests,
what is their personal story, what is their background? Share
your story with them
• Be transparent about expectations up front and in beginning
• Define boundaries (access, personal/professional, respectful
behavior)
• Give TIME to the mentee---make time, don’t allow interruptions,
focus your energy
• Be involved every step in the student’s project: setting
deadlines, reviewing drafts, providing assessment of progress,
helping publishing/presenting
• Use concrete language in critique---generalities may not work;
be constructive (not destructive) and temper criticism with praise
• Keep track of mentee progress and CELEBRATE openly
• Support the value of mistakes; share your own
• Be tuned to emotional and physical distress of mentee
• Tell the mentee what you are learning from them as well as
what they need to learn
• Discussion: pick two best practices that you want to focus on
and explain to your table how you will implement this in your
next URSCA project (5 minutes)
• “Mentors are advisers, people with career experience willing
to share their knowledge; supporters, people who give
emotional and moral encouragement; tutors, people who give
specific feedback to one’s performance; masters, in the sense
of employers to whom one is apprenticed; sponsors, sources of
information about and aid in obtaining opportunities; models,
of identity of the kind of person one should be to be an
academic.” Morris Zelditch (1995)
• Mitchell Malachowski, The Mentoring Role in Undergraduate Research Projects, Council on
Undergraduate Research Quarterly, December 1996
• Herb Childress, Gloria Cox, Susan Eve, Amy Orr and Julio Rivera, Mentoring as a
socializing activity—supporting undergraduate research in the social sciences, 2009
• Handelman, Pfund, Lauffer and Pribbenow, Entering Mentoring: A Seminar to Train a New
Generation of Scientists, Wisconsin Program for Scientific Teaching, 2005
• How to Mentor Graduate Students: A Guide for Faculty, University of Michigan Rackham
Graduate School, 2013
• University of Miami, The Mentoring Guide, Office of Undergraduate Research,
www.miami,edu/ugr
• Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research webpage, Undergraduate
Research Mentoring Exercises, http://craw.org/ArticleDetails/tabid/77/ArticleID/109/Resources-for-Mentors-of-UndergraduateResearch.aspx
• For multi-purpose articles, see http://craw.org/ArticleDetails/tabid/77/ArticleID/109/Resources-for-Mentors-of-UndergraduateResearch.aspx