Professional Scientist/Researcher

Optimizing Your Mentoring Relationships: Building a Mentoring Network

Workshop presentation by Dr. Melissa McDaniels from Michigan State University, graduate student and postdoctoral participants will be urged to think about the proactive roles they can play in ‘mentoring up’ – strategically and authentically negotiating their constellation of mentoring relationships. Using this lens, participants will be brought through a series of guided conversations and exercises to help them thing about how they might ‘map’ their mentoring networks, anchored by professional competencies, to empower themselves to optimize all mentoring relationships.

Having Culturally Sensitive Mentoring Conversations: Faculty Session

High quality mentoring is an important predictor of persistence for researchers pursuing careers in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields and can influence the confidence of historically underrepresented trainees' ability to successfully conduct research. Despite this, mentors typically do not receive any training on how to optimize their mentoring relationships. Stories from student mentees from historically underrepresented backgrounds will be shared to learn from their perspectives.

Key Strategies for Mentoring: Part 2

Workshop Presentation: High quality mentoring is an important predictor of persistence for researchers pursuing careers in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields and can influence the confidence of historically underrepresented trainees’ ability to successfully conduct research. Despite this, mentors typically do not receive any training on how to optimize their mentoring relationships.

Key Strategies for Mentoring: Part I

Worksop Presentation: High quality mentoring is an important predictor of persistence for researchers pursuing careers in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields and can influence the confidence of historically underrepresented trainees' ability to successfully conduct research. Despite this, mentors typically do not receive any training on how to optimize their mentoring relationships.

Culturally Aware Mentoring

Mentoring is an important factor in the satisfaction, productivity and persistence of mentees across disciplines yet research shows that the landscape of mentoring is unequal. Mentees from traditionally underrepresented groups (UG) report less access to mentoring and rate the mentoring they do receive lower in quality. Moreover, mentees from UGs more frequently report feeling a sense of isolation in their research environments and pressure to hide their cultural identities while at work.

Mental Health in Graduate Education: What Faculty, Friends, and Family Can Do

Stories and statistics abound about the struggles of graduate education and the risks for wellbeing that it poses to students. In this plenary, we’ll explore both root causes of mental illness among today’s generation of graduate students, the unique barriers experienced by members of minoritized communities, as well as the proactive steps that faculty, friends, and family can take to provide support and challenge toxic norms within academia.