FAQs for Mentors

There are four main things you are expected to do:

• Help your student find a project. If they have a rough idea of what they want to study, then your job is to help them narrow it down to a precise topic they can learn over the course of a single semester. If they don't know what they want to study, then your job is to suggest a topic and gently nudge them in this direction. 

• Oversee their study of this topic. This means helping them come up with a study plan for the entire semester and meeting with them every week to answer their questions and have them present material to you.

• Help your student prepare for their virtual presentation at the end of the semester. Your responsibilities here include helping them organize their talk and having them give practice talks to you. 

• Attend a mentor training/orientation at the beginning of the semester, a check-in meeting halfway through the semester, and the talks symposium at the end.

Most mentors meet with their students for about an hour each week. Any longer than that is up to you and your student. The mentor training lasts about 45 minutes, the check-in meeting about 30 mins, and the symposium about 1.5 hours.

• To understand how students learn, we recommend the book How Learning Works by Ambrose et al. 

• To diagnose various classroom problems, we suggest having a look at the interactive website Solve a Teaching Problem that's run by the Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence & Educational Innovation at Carnegie Mellon.

• To learn about providing critical feedback across the racial divide, we suggest the paper The Mentor's Dilemma by Cohen et al. 

• For a survey of culturally responsive mentoring practices, we suggest Chapters 3 and 5 of The Science of Effective Mentorship in STEMM, the National Academies report on mentoring from 2019. Note that the second "M" is for medicine.

We thank the DRP Network, Dr. Danny Martin, and Dr. Ebony McGee for these references.