Mentorship Cluster

*Biweekly meetings Mondays 4pm via Zoom*

Mentorship can make an enormous difference as you negotiate your identity in STEM, but that doesn't mean all mentorship is productive. We've been researching for years about how to make mentorship programs fulfilling and we've used this knowledge to launch several projects that use mentorship to address inherent inequities in academic professional culture. Explore some of the programs we're working on below!

This cluster focuses on researching and developing materials on best mentorship practices for STEM Routes mentors as well as managing our formal mentorship programming. 

General Responsibilities:

• Campus-wide Mentorship Training: STEM Routes is a commonly used resource for training other mentorship programs across campus. We've created several workshops including:
  • Mentorship Theory
  • Mentorship Action
  • Navigating Imposter Syndrome
  • Invisible Identities
  • Finding a Sense of Belonging in STEM

Part of the mentorship role involves scheduling and hosting these mentorship training sessions. We often charge campus units when we are invited to train, and those funds are deposited into our STEM Routes account to pay our mentors. (This means you'll be working closely with the Finance & Admin cluster to coordinate the transfer of these funds.)

• Research: Keep up with literature and research on how to be an effective mentor! We always want to improve and better serve our communities. If you find a new way to improve our mentorship practices, please tell us about it at our general meetings!
• Shadow a Graduate Student Program: This is a brand new program we are piloting. It involves an application-based process of selecting and matching undergraduates who do not have research experience with a current graduate student who can demonstrate what a day in the life of a research assistant looks like. We are currently piloting this program before we expand it to the larger community.
• Career Center Services Collaboration: Many Career Centers, while offering great advice, are not trained to support the unique needs of underrepresented students on our campus. We are working collaboratively with Career Services to develop a community-centered spin on the Career Center's Skills for Success program.
• Intentional Mentorship Program for Native American & Indigenous Grad Students in STEM: We received grant funding from the Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences to pilot a 2-year mentorship program designed to support the unique needs of Native American and Indigenous students in STEM graduate programs. If this program is successful, we hope to expand the model to serve other affinity groups in the Colleges of Arts & Sciences and Engineering & Applied Science.

UpLift Responsibilities:

• Schedule and lead training for our lab mentors (who work directly with our undergraduate UpLift students)
• Check in with lab mentors biweekly about how their student is progressing
• Develop and coordinate identity-based mentorship for UpLift students who seek more support outside of their labwork