Mentoring Graduate Students Research Articles

Mentoring as a transformative experience

ABSTRACT Graduate student mentoring is a key component of successful university experiences, specifically, improved student retention, completion, and satisfaction. Tensions in application of existing mentoring frameworks create difficulties with university-wide approaches. We used a descriptive qualitative study design to explore graduate students’ perspectives about mentoring. We interviewed 54 Canadian participants in 12 focus groups, including masters’ (n= 19), unclassified (n= 1), and PhD (n= 34) students from multiple disciplines. Focus groups ranged in size from two to seven students. After transcribing interviews, we used inductive content analysis to develop themes. Students described mentoring as a transformative experience because mentors smoothed their paths. Receiving mentoring required students to advocate for themselves and access university structures that promoted mentoring. Transformative mentoring supported students’ aspirational goals. Mentoring strengthens institutional supervisory practices and graduate student retention and success but it requires systematic approaches.

Mentoring Black Teens during National Pandemics: Mutually Beneficial Service

Black youth face systemic educational and social barriers that impede their development and achievement. Research shows that mentoring equips youth to tackle these barriers and use their racial background as an asset. Additionally, college students have limited opportunities to engage in long-term service to local communities. The Heads Up Teen Mentoring Program was begun in September 2019 to provide local Black teens access to Black role models committed to helping them achieve their goals. We currently serve five local Black teens and pair them with five Black graduate student mentors. We engage in monthly group and one-on-one sessions with our teens to provide safe spaces for teens to build life skills and decompress. In this essay, we reflect on how our service as mentors has impacted both our teens and ourselves. We focus our reflection on how we are addressing challenges brought on by the COVID-19 and longstanding police brutality pandemics. Specifically, we have found virtual ways to continue group engagement such as virtual game nights, virtual escape rooms, and weekly challenges using group messaging. We also hosted a virtual healing session for our teens addressing systemic racism with a licensed psychologist and added monthly check-in sessions where teens can unload their stresses. We have learned that our teens struggle through these pandemics in ways similar to us, except they lack safe spaces to unpack these challenges. Teens value having a mentor to talk with who is genuinely interested in their growth. We, as mentors, value the opportunity to invest in Black youth and appreciate this service-based opportunity to develop leadership and mentoring skills. Offering virtual programming to address teens' concerns has been a mutually beneficial form of service by creating a safe space for both teens’ and mentors’ development and well-being.

Introducing a Novel Undergraduate Research Education Initiative: The URNCST Journal Mentored Paper

The Undergraduate Research in Natural and Clinical Science and Technology (URNCST) Journal Mentored Paper initiative is a unique undergraduate research education opportunity open to undergraduate and professional-undergraduate degree students internationally. Participants are invited to submit an abstract on a selected topic and be paired with a graduate student mentor with an interest and expertise in the research area. Over a three-month period, the mentor and mentee(s) work together to turn the unpolished abstract into a full-length manuscript of publishable quality. In this short editorial, we provide an overview of how our editorial team successfully conceptualized, developed, and established this initiative. Undergraduate students interested in submitting an abstract to the next URNCST Journal Mentored Paper round should visit: https://www.urncst.com/index.php/urncst/mentored_paper. Graduate students interested in serving as a mentor should visit https://www.urncst.com/index.php/urncst/about/#_Toc487899585to apply to the URNCST Journal.

Mentoring Graduate Students to Become Effective Teaching Assistants: Developing and Implementing a Student-Centred Program for Nursing

Mentoring Graduate Students to Become Effective Teaching Assistants: Developing and Implementing a Student-Centred Program for Nursing

When Words Do Not Matter: Identifying Actions to Effect Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the Academy

It is time to move past the words—the well-crafted statements circulated by groups and organizations across the academy, the scholarly writing as displacement, the formal and informal critiques—as if they had some recognizable impact. Each of these rhetorical moves can be valuable in helping to effect larger cultural and structural shifts. Yet, alone, a variety of evidence suggests that these forms of communication fail at effecting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Therefore, through our varied areas of research and lived work experiences, we focus attention toward actions as sites of power and potential: (a) in faculty emotional labor and work (McLeod), (b) at various levels of university administration and structural change (Ashcraft and Allen), (c) in the time-based practices associated with the ways we teach and mentor graduate students (Ballard), and (d) in our corpus of scholarship (Ganesh and Zoller).

(Dis)Ability-informed Mentors Support Occupational Performance for College Students with Learning Disabilities and Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorders through Problem Solving and a Focus on Strengths.

Students with learning disabilities (LD) and Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (LD/ADHD) are well-represented on college campuses. However, they experience challenges to meeting occupational and role expectations associated with being in college. Mentors serve as natural supports for young people within college environments. This study investigates the ways in which graduate-student mentors, who were supported in understanding LD/ADHD and their mentee's strengths and challenges through an occupational lens, provided problem solving supports for undergraduate mentees with LD/ADHD. Thematic qualitative analysis was used to investigate problem solving supports provided by mentors (N = 57) of undergraduate mentees (N = 52) with LD/ADHD. Three themes, Executive Functioning, Adult Life Skills, and Academics, represent areas in which mentors worked with mentees in guiding and co-creating strategies to address academic, social, and daily life challenges. Mentors' understandings of their mentees' disability-related challenges and strengths within everyday life situations was important for fostering the occupational performance of mentees. The inclusion of biopsychosocial approaches is needed in the development of disability-related mentorship interventions where occupational therapists can leverage disciplinary understanding of disabilities and the fostering of occupational performance to support social functioning and participation in college.

Mentoring graduate students in an era of faculty career restructuring

ABSTRACT The past three decades have witnessed a major restructuring in faculty appointments and careers. Tenure-track and tenured faculty are declining as a share of the professoriate while non-tenure track positions, part-time and full-time, are soaring. Yet many in academia have an incomplete or simplistic knowledge of the nature of this fastest-growing segment of the professoriate and continue to mentor and prepare graduate students solely for tenure-track positions with distributed responsibilities in research, teaching and service. For us to become better mentors, we must understand the profound changes that are underway in the academic job market. This paper discusses the factors that have led to the restructuring of faculty appointments and careers, describes the nature of the new faculty positions, and provides guidance on how we can become better mentors to our graduate students seeking academic appointments.

Authorship Not Taught and Not Caught in Undergraduate Research Experiences at a Research University

This grounded study investigated the negotiation of authorship by faculty members, graduate student mentors, and their undergraduate protégés in undergraduate research experiences at a private research university in the northeastern United States. Semi-structured interviews using complementary scripts were conducted separately with 42 participants over a 3year period to probe their knowledge and understanding of responsible authorship and publication practices and learn how faculty and students entered into authorship decision-making intended to lead to the publication of peer-reviewed technical papers. Herein the theoretical model for the negotiation of authorship developed through the analysis of these interviews is reported. The model identifies critical causal and intervening conditions responsible for the coping strategies faculty and students employ, which, in our study, appear to often produce unfortunate consequences for all involved. The undergraduate student researchers and their graduate student mentors interviewed in this study exhibited a limited understanding of authorship and the requirements for authorship in their research groups. The power differential between faculty and students, the students' limited epistemic development, the busy-ness of the faculty, and the faculty's failure to prioritize authorship have been identified as key factors inhibiting both undergraduate and graduate students from developing a deeper understanding of responsible authorship and publication practices. Implications for graduate education and undergraduate research are discussed, and strategies for helping all students to develop a deeper understanding of authorship are identified.

Graduate students mentoring undergraduate students’ business innovation pitches

Pitch competitions are commonplace throughout undergraduate and graduate entrepreneurship curricula. Although they are valuable exercises, advancements are available to further their usefulness and reach a wider audience. Accordingly, we developed an experiential learning exercise rooted in the tenets of corporate entrepreneurship that allows for greater collaboration, learning, and critical thinking. In the exercise, undergraduate student groups develop and present an innovative initiative, then are scored and mentored by MBA student groups prior to the final pitches. The benefits include improved student learning by undergraduate students from graduate student mentors as well as improved mentoring and leadership skills for graduate students through the practical and experiential process of helping undergraduate students improve their pitches.

Interactive youth science workshops benefit student participants and graduate student mentors.

Science communication and outreach are essential for training the next generation of scientists and raising public awareness for science. Providing effective science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) educational outreach to students in classrooms is challenging because of the need to form partnerships with teachers, the time commitment required for the presenting scientist, and the limited class time allotted for presentations. In our Present Your Ph.D. Thesis to a 12-Year Old outreach project, our novel solution to this problem is hosting a youth science workshop (YSW) on our university campus. The YSW is an interpersonal science communication and outreach experience in which graduate students from diverse scientific disciplines introduce middle and high school students to their cutting-edge research and mentor them to develop a white-board presentation to communicate the research to the workshop audience. Our assessment of the YSW indicated that participating young students expressed significantly more positive attitudes toward science and increased motivation to work in a STEM career after attending the workshop. Qualitative follow-up interviews with participating graduate students’ show that even with minimal time commitment, an impactful science communication training experience can be achieved. The YSW is a low-cost, high-reward educational outreach event amenable to all disciplines of science. It enhances interest and support of basic science research while providing opportunities for graduate students to engage with the public, improve their science communication skills, and enhance public understanding of science. This YSW model can be easily implemented at other higher education institutions to globally enhance science outreach initiatives.

Mentoring in Business and Professional Communication: Case Study of a Multiyear Dynamic

Mentoring of graduate students is essential to the professional development of business and professional communication (BPC) scholars; it also helps advance the field of BPC and its disciplinary identity. In this article, a professor and graduate student use a case-study approach incorporating historical/archival data collection and grounded in critical reflection to describe and characterize their own long-term, cross-institutional mentoring relationship. They analyze artifacts from their mentoring experience; discuss benefits and challenges to mentoring in BPC; offer implications for mentees, mentors, and academic programs in creating formal mentoring plans; and suggest topics for further research.

Building and maintaining an active research laboratory with undergraduates

Immersing undergraduates in research is important for the advancement of students into graduate school and the workforce. Mentoring undergraduates, however, often requires a different approach than mentoring graduate students. In this talk, I will share practical tips on how I have built and maintained an active, funded research laboratory at a primarily undergraduate institution. Specifically, I will explain my strategies for attracting and retaining students, my tiered mentoring approach for first-year through senior students, and the benefits I have received from these mentoring relationships.Immersing undergraduates in research is important for the advancement of students into graduate school and the workforce. Mentoring undergraduates, however, often requires a different approach than mentoring graduate students. In this talk, I will share practical tips on how I have built and maintained an active, funded research laboratory at a primarily undergraduate institution. Specifically, I will explain my strategies for attracting and retaining students, my tiered mentoring approach for first-year through senior students, and the benefits I have received from these mentoring relationships.

Balancing Fundamental and Practical Aspects in Nanoelectrochemistry Research and Teaching Involving Non-Traditional Students

Many applications in analysis and energy and beyond require fundamental understanding of electrochemistry concepts and techniques. Knowledge from multi-disciplines such as surface/interface, kinetics and thermodynamics, and electronics converges in the interpretation and control of an electrochemical process. Appropriate focus and balance between fundamentals and applications can be important in both research and classroom teaching. This talk will discuss some unique challenges and opportunities at Georgia State where non-traditional students constitute a significant population. There will be basic discussions about the classroom teaching including Ph. D., M. S. and undergraduate students. The focus will be about the research and mentoring of graduate and upper level undergraduate students. Nanoelectrochemistry is a central theme in GWang’s research group. Research results in the area of near infrared electrochemiluminescence from atomic-precision metal nanoclusters will be discussed as examples for the recruitment and training of traditional and non-traditional students. Basics of electrochemiluminescence, atomic-precision nanoclusters, as well as the development of sensing strategies and mechanisms for signal amplification will be introduced. Financial supports from NSF (CHE-1610616) and DOE (DE-SC0019043) are acknowledged.

A Mixed Data Analysis of Graduate Student Mentoring for Faculty Careers in School Psychology

Mentoring has been identified as an essential component in the development and success of future faculty. As such, the purpose of this study was to gain a better understanding of the mentoring experiences of graduate students enrolled in school psychology programs. Additionally, we wanted to determine if differences were present in the mentoring experiences of self-identified racial minority students and their White peers given the lack of diversity among school psychology faculty. Quantitative analyses indicated that students enrolled in school psychology programs are fairly satisfied with their mentoring experiences. However, respondents who completed the open-ended questions indicated that they had difficulty accessing their mentor, they wanted more mentoring on careers in academia, and that they desired more support for conducting research and teaching. Therefore, there are several aspects of mentoring that need to be improved if the field of school psychology wants to increase the number of students who will peruse a career in higher education.

How to Be a Better Scientist

This edition focuses on another facet of being an effective scientist for which we may not have received formal training during our graduate programs and which may cause us quite a bit of anxiety (or even panic in some cases): scientific communication. As professional scientists, we are primarily trained to talk to and write for other scientists; think of the numerous presentations you have given at scientific conferences or the papers you have published in peer-reviewed journals. But from what sources do people commonly get their information? Hint: for nonscientists, it is typically not journal articles. As a graduate student, I convinced myself that if I could tell my family about my research and its importance during family gatherings and they understood it (or at least enough of it that they could argue with me), then I had been an effective science communicator. In hindsight, this was obviously a bit of an oversimplification. If we as scientists want to be part of important conversations, from challenges with global climate and land use change to scientific funding to local or regional natural resources management and restoration strategies, we need to be able to effectively communicate with diverse audiences: policy-makers; municipal, state, and federal governmental units; natural resources managers; funding agencies; environmental to industrial stakeholder groups; and concerned citizens. Luckily in the past decade, there has been a strong emphasis on science communication training within scientific societies, including ASLO. I asked ASLO members for recommendations on science communication training resources; the results follow below. Baron, N. 2010. Escape from the ivory tower: A guide to making your science matter, 2nd edition. Island Press. The book does a really nice job reminding scientists that not everyone speaks our language, has the same goals in life, or spends 40+ hours a week doing science. If you want to reach outside your typical sphere of influence, you will need a different set of skills, and a fresh perspective on the audience you are trying to reach—Elisha Wood-Charlson, Biosciences, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Berkeley, CA. Alda, A. 2017. If I understood you, would I have this look on my face? My adventures in the art and science of relating and communicating. Random House. Alan Alda does an amazing, and hilarious, job of understanding the nuances in communication—verbal and nonverbal. Highly recommended for anyone wanting to connect better—Elisha Wood-Charlson, Biosciences, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Berkeley, CA. Hayes, R., and D. Grossman. 2006. A scientist's guide to talking with the media: Practical advice from the Union of Concerned Scientists. Rutgers Univ. Press. As a practicing science communicator, public information officer, and editor, I recommend A Scientist's Guide to Talking with the Media: Practical Advice from the Union of Concerned Scientists by Richard Hayes and Daniel Grossman. The 170-page book is a resource for how scientists can engage media to raise awareness of scientific research and thought. It is not flashy or cutesy; it is practical, and it works by offering advice tailored to the needs and constraints of both scientists and journalists—Marie Thoms, Minnesota Sea Grant, Duluth, MN. Evans, M. C., and C. Cvitanovic. 2018. An introduction to achieving policy impact for early career researchers. Palgrave Commun. 4: 88. Available from https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-018-0144-2. I recommend the article because it offers concrete, actionable steps that early career scientists can take to engage in policy—Michelle McCrackin, Baltic Eye, Baltic Sea Center, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden. Looking for some more resources on science communication? The L&O Bulletin has compiled two virtual issues related to this topic: Spotlight on Science Communication, which includes book reviews of Houston, We Have a Narrative by Randy Olson and Connection: Hollywood Storytelling Meets Critical Thinking by Randy Olson, Dorie Barton, and Brain Palermo; and Science Meets Policy: How To's and Success Stories. Both virtual issues can be found under the virtual issues tab of the L&O Bulletin homepage (https://aslopubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/15396088/). Interested in more formal training in science communication? Check out The Flame Challenge from the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University (https://www.aldacenter.org/outreach/flame-challenge). Thanks to Clayton Williams from University of Vermont, Burlington, VT for the recommendation. For the next edition, I will focus on another critical aspect of being a better scientist for which we typically do not receive much formal training: undergraduate and graduate student mentoring. This column is appearing as a trial run in 2019 issues of the L&O Bulletin. If you have any thoughts or critiques of this column, or suggestions for additional resources on this topic or for topics to cover in future issues, please feel free to contact me. You can email me at filstrup@aslo.org or tweet me @ctfilstrup. Please be sure to tag the L&O Bulletin (#ASLO_Bulletin) in your tweets.

Message from The Executive Director

Message from The Executive Director

Transitions and choices: Graduate student mentoring for psychology honours students

Peer mentoring programs are typically designed to support students transitioning into university. However, recent work has highlighted the importance of supporting transitions through and out of university. The Australian psychology honours year is a particularly stressful period that involves transitioning through university into the research environment and is soon followed by transitions into the workforce or postgraduate study. The School of Psychology at the University of New South Wales, Australia (UNSW) recently developed a graduate/honours peer mentoring program. Pairs of PhD students mentor small groups of honours students in monthly meetings, discussing various aspects of honours and career options. Most honours students sign up for mentoring and evaluation results show that mentees find the program helpful, most frequently acknowledging that their mentors helped them with general advice and understanding their career options. Peer mentoring can therefore support psychology student transitions through and out of university.

Opportunities for graduate studies in acoustics within the College of Engineering at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln

A number of faculty in the College of Engineering at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln (UNL) conduct research in acoustics and mentor graduate students. Within the Durham School of Architectural Engineering and Construction, based at UNL’s Scott Campus in Omaha, Lily Wang and Erica Ryherd are active in architectural acoustics and noise (http://nebraskaacousticsgroup.org ). In Civil Engineering, Jinying Zhu (also based on UNL’s Scott Campus in Omaha) focuses in structural acoustics, using ultrasonic waves for concrete evaluation. In Mechanical and Materials Engineering, Joseph Turner (based at UNL’s City Campus in Lincoln) studies ultrasound propagation through complex media for quantitative characterization of materials/microstructure (http://quisp.unl.edu ). UNL is additionally home to an active student chapter of the Acoustical Society of America, the first to be founded in 2004. This poster will summarize the graduate-level acoustics courses and lab facilities at UNL within the College of Engineering, as well as the research interests and achievements of our faculty, graduates, and students.

Merging Undergraduate Teaching, Graduate Training, and Producing Research: Lessons from Three Collaborative Experiments

ABSTRACTTeaching undergraduate students, mentoring graduate students, and generating publishable research are distinct tasks for many political scientists. This article highlights lessons for merging these activities through experiences from an initiative that sparked a series of collaborative-research projects focused on opinions about crime and punishment in the United States. This article describes three collaborative projects conducted between 2015 and 2017 to demonstrate how to merge undergraduate teaching, graduate training, and producing research. By participating in these projects, students learned about social-scientific research through hands-on experiences designing experiments, collecting and analyzing original data, and reporting empirical findings to a public audience. This approach is an effective way to engage students and generate research that can advance professional goals.

Perspective from grad school: Holding back the tears

My old graduate student mentor will get his Ph.D. on Wednesday. When I saw the announcement, I was frozen. It wasn’t until I said the words out loud, over the phone to a friend on my way home, that the tears came. I dodged strange looks shooting at me like bullets from passersby on the busy city street. The tears came again while I was in the lab, mumbling to my boss about military homecoming videos as the reason for the tears on my cheeks. And then the tears came again when I was at home, lying on the carpet, staring at the ceiling as a thunderstorm roared outside. And then they came again when I was 10 miles into a 16-mile run; I had to stop because I couldn’t breathe. My harasser will get his Ph.D. on Wednesday. I did everything right. I reported, I spoke up, and I