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HHMI Teaching Fellows Program in Mentoring
The HHMI Teaching Fellows Program in mentoring is designed to provide graduate students and postdocs with knowledge, skills, experience and a community of support in mentoring. Each mentor participates in the 1 credit Mentoring Seminar during the summer while concurrently mentoring a full-time Undergraduate Research Scholar in the lab.
Mentors Seminar
The mentors enroll in a seminar course about mentoring. In the course, we discuss objectives for the undergraduate projects, mentoring styles, troubleshooting, and how to help the undergraduates develop confidence, independence, creativity, and strong communication skills. We discuss ethnic and gender issues, including some of the research on prejudices, as well as how to accommodate diverse intellectual styles in the research lab. This is a particularly important topic given the ethnic diversity of the undergraduate students and the almost monochromatic nature of the mentors (Table 1). The mentors reflect on both mentoring and being mentored. We ask them each to conduct a negotiation with their advisor, to discuss an issue about their undergraduate with their advisor, and to share with the group a moment in mentoring derived from their experiences of being mentored. The mentors each write a description of their student’s project, a mentoring philosophy, a list of their goals for the mentoring relationship, a description of a mentoring challenge, a solution to a mentoring challenge, and key items that should be in a “mentors’ toolbox.” Reading assignments include excerpts from the NAS report “Advisor, Teacher, Role Model,” and “At the Helm” by Kathy Barker as well as case studies that illustrate common knotty problems in mentoring
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