Mentorship
Mentorship is a professional, working alliance in which individuals work together to support the personal and professional growth, development, and success of the relational partners through the provision of career and psychosocial support.
You should expect to have multiple mentors throughout your graduate education. The roles of mentors are to help you achieve your research and career goals, as well as develop skills that are core to your research or scholarship experiences. Being proactive as a mentee can help ensure you get what you need from a mentoring relationship. As you progress through graduate school, you are likely to be a mentor to others.
Source: The Science of Mentoring Relationships: What is Mentorship?
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Get the Mentorship You Need
Mentorship matters for gaining skills and connections. To find the right mentors, ask yourself questions like:
- Where can I be successful?
- Knowing that I should be working with a network of mentors, which ones can help me achieve my career goals?
- Where will I be comfortable?
- What characteristics do I value in a research group and/or with a primary mentor?
Source: Entering Mentoring
What can I do to get the mentorship I need?
- Know the characteristics of an ideal mentoring relationship, which include resiliency, flexibility, and openness.
- Learn effective communication strategies in an academic mentoring relationship, such as the importance of early discussions about relationship logistics and bigger-picture topics like professional development.
- Suggest to your faculty advisor that you create a mentoring compact or contract, which helps you both establish common expectations, explicit goals, and methods of communication.
- Plan out and assess your mentor network, and develop a supportive network for strategic career advancement.
Learn more about working effectively with a mentor
The interactive, self-paced micro-course A Graduate Student Guide to Working with Faculty Advisors explains the characteristics of functional and dysfunctional relationships with faculty advisors, strategies for communicating effectively and aligning expectations, as well as program grievance processes and hostile and intimidating behavior resources. Completion of the micro-course takes about 20 minutes and is optional but encouraged for all graduate students.
Become the Mentor You Want to Be
Mentoring will be an important part of your future faculty or research position. Even before you move on from UW–Madison, you will likely be responsible for mentoring others while completing your training.
The Graduate School is committed to offering a full range of professional development opportunities, including high-quality seminars in effective and inclusive research mentor training for graduate students and postdocs through the Delta Program.
- Here’s one effective mentoring strategy that you can use right now: Create a mentor-mentee compact. Find a mentorship agreement template and mentor-mentee compact examples below.
- Take a deeper dive into your mentoring practices to acquire a broad set of skills alongside your peers: Enroll in a research mentor learning community through the Delta Program, for university credit or no credit.
Are you mentoring now or in the future?
The Delta Program’s Research Mentor Learning Communities follow a nationally-recognized curriculum, Entering Mentoring, and offer an expansive environment in which to practice and experiment, tapping into the range of experiences and insights of the group.
Seminars are offered every semester, including the summer. Sign up for the Delta mailing list to hear about future seminars when they are open for registration.
Delta was immensely important in developing my mentoring skills, which I used in several dozen mentoring relationships over the past decade.
Effective Mentoring Practices
Mentoring compacts that help align expectations between mentors and mentees
Ten simple rules for developing a mentor-mentee expectations document, Masters KS, Kreeger PK (2017). PLoS Comput Biol 13(9): e1005709
Download the printable Mentorship Agreement Template PDF by the UW–Madison Institute for Clinical and Translational Research.
The purpose of this template is to assist you in documenting mutually agreed upon goals and parameters that will serve as the foundation for your mentoring relationships. While mentors and mentees may find mentorship agreements to be useful, they are optional. This template is expected to be altered to meet individual needs.
Write down responses for these prompts:
- Goals (what you hope to achieve as a result of this relationship; for example, gain perspective relative to skills necessary for success in academia, explore new career opportunities and alternatives, obtain knowledge of organizational culture, networking, leadership skill development, etc.)
- Steps to achieving goals as stated above (for example, meeting regularly, manuscripts and grants, collaborating on research projects, steps to achieving independence, etc.)
- Meeting frequency (frequency, duration, and location of meetings)
- Confidentiality: Any sensitive issues that we discuss will be held in the strictest of confidence. Issues that are off limits for discussion include…
- Plan for evaluating relationship effectiveness (for example, bi-annual review of mentorship meeting minutes, goals, outcomes, and accomplishments)
Relationship termination clause: In the event that either party finds the mentoring relationship unproductive and requests that it be terminated, we agree to honor that individual’s decision without question or blame.
Duration: This mentorship relationship will continue as long as both parties feel comfortable with its productivity or until: [enter date]
Both the mentor and mentee should sign the mentorship agreement. Include the date signed.
Research and additional resources
The Science of Effective Mentorship in STEMM, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (2019). Washington, DC: The National Academies Press
Research and resources for mentors and mentees, Center for the Improvement of Mentored Experiences in Research (requires a free user registration)
UW–Madison faculty in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM) can also find mentor training through WISCIENCE.
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