Falling Through the Cracks: Graduate Students’ Experiences of Mentoring Absence

Abstract

Theory about how mentorship is supposed to work, its goals, and what “makes it work” is abundant. It is rarer to encounter empirical information about processes and implications when mentoring is a problem. Graduate students experience significant psychological, physical, financial, and relational challenges and likely have expectations about the ameliorating effects of mentorship. Limited qualitative literature has described graduate students’ perceptions about problems with mentorship and students’ outcomes. The descriptive qualitative study used secondary analysis to describe students’ perceptions of problematic mentorship. Graduate student research assistants conducted 12 recorded focus group interviews and transcribed them. The authors used inductive content analysis to develop themes. Fifty-four participants were recruited, including masters’ (n=19), PhD (n=34), and a graduate student not enrolled in a specific faculty (n=1). The students represented multiple disciplines. The major theme identified was “falling through the cracks.” The subthemes included missing mentorship, students’ difficulties accessing mentorship, university structures undermining mentoring, and damage to mentees. Falling through the cracks highlights students’ struggles with accessing mentorship, effects of missing mentorship, and students’ solutions for modifying structural features that inhibit mentoring. Quantitative work could compare psychological outcomes associated with present and missing mentoring.