Updated November 2020

Overview

The department chair will assign two faculty mentors to every tenure track and teaching track professor in a promotable position. One of the mentors should be closer to the professor’s area of research or teaching and the other should be more distant. The department chair should also consider having one of the mentors be a little less senior (associate or early full) because they will likely better remember the challenges of being in a more junior position. 

There will also be optional peer mentoring groups formed based on faculty who are similar in rank. This will allow for additional mentoring opportunities and provide a network approach to mentoring.

An “individual mentoring group” will consist of the professor and their two mentors. A “peer mentoring group” is a group of peers who can meet with each other and provide additional forms of mentorship. The Awards & Mentorship Committee will track whether mentoring groups meet each quarter, and the Assistant to the Chair will send out quarterly reminders to meet. We encourage these meetings to take place over lunch when possible. Expenses for lunch will be covered by the department, and receipts should be submitted to the front office. 

Schedule

Fall Quarter 

Each individual mentoring group will meet some time in the quarter for lunch. The mentee should come prepared with a list of questions and things to discuss with their mentors. One potential topic for this meeting may be what they might include in their Chapter 24 plan.

Each peer mentoring group will self-organize a social lunch, coffee chat, or happy hour. 

Winter Quarter 

Each individual mentoring group will meet some time in the quarter for lunch. One potential topic for this meeting is preparing for upcoming merit reviews in the Spring.

Each peer mentoring group will self-organize a social lunch, coffee chat, or happy hour. 

Spring Quarter 

During faculty merit review, the two mentors for each mentee should take notes while their mentee is being discussed. They should then plan to meet with the mentee over lunch to discuss feedback and help make plans for addressing it, if needed. 

Mentoring Guidelines 

A good faculty mentoring program provides support to help junior faculty be as productive and satisfied as possible in their careers, through promotion and beyond. Mentoring is not merely a bean-counting exercise to ensure that a professor in a promotable position has enough publications or strong enough teaching to make it through the promotion process. The goal is to support new faculty in becoming effective educators and for tenure track faculty, in also developing a vibrant, high-impact research program. 

Here are a few important things that mentors should do: 

For both tenure track and teaching track faculty:

• Meet regularly with their mentee professor.
• Ensure them that your conversations are confidential.
• Listen carefully to questions/needs/frustrations.
• Help familiarize them with the promotion and tenure guidelines at the department level, the college level, and the university level.
• Offer them examples of and to review their annual work plan in support of their Chapter 24 meetings.
• Help them achieve a healthy work/life balance. For example, tell them when they can say no (e.g., giving a talk to the local Rotary), and when a request may be more important to say yes to (e.g., serving on an NSF review panel). Help them with time management strategies, if necessary. 
• Help connect the mentee professor with available resources, like grant writing and teaching workshops. BE a resource. For example, offer to read drafts of papers and grant proposals or review syllabi for new classes; offer constructive feedback in a timely way. 
• Observe their teaching and give them advice to make teaching easier and better. Let them know that people are often willing to share their teaching materials. 
• Educate the new faculty member about the promotion and/or tenure process, especially after they observe faculty discussions of other merit/promotion cases. Encourage them to get known by some people who would be letter writers for them at outside high quality peer institutions. 
• Tell stories of your own learning experiences, showing them that all of us have to go through a learning process, make some mistakes, don’t check all the boxes, and are surprised but not defeated by mistakes.

For tenure track and research faculty:

• For tenure track faculty, identify gaps in the mentee’s research portfolio and provide actionable advice to address them. Help them learn which are the high impact journals and conferences. For example, have them focus on conferences with archival proceedings and journals rather than workshops and conferences with no proceedings. 
• Discuss with them how to recruit, retain, and mentor graduate students. Help them see how to use undergraduates as research assistants for class credit. 
• Share with them your strategies for obtaining funding, the differences between grants and contracts and gifts, and the resources that are available to help (e.g., the accountant to help put together an appropriate budget). Offer to read drafts of the description of proposed work. 
• Help them develop a coherent research agenda with a clear statement of impact, including the “elevator speech” or pitch. Have them focus not only on the actual work but why it is important. Do not encourage them to do work on lots of different topics; stick to one or two major problems to work on to make a coherent whole program.