Optimizing Mentorship on your Research Teams

Selena Connealy: Welcome everybody. We’ll be starting our webinar in another minute or so just to give folks a chance to log on Welcome everybody to the smart grid center webinar series. We’ll get started in one more minute…let a few folks get logged on. All right, why don’t we go ahead and get started? Welcome to The New Mexico’s SMART Grid Center webinar on optimizing mentorship for your research teams. I’m Selena Connealy, the Education and Outreach Manager for New Mexico EPSCoR. Together with Brittney Van Der Werff, our public information officer, I’ll be hosting the webinar today. I’ve got a few housekeeping items before I introduce our speaker.

First, this webinar 02:19 - will be recorded and archived on our website nmepscor.org so you have an opportunity to share it with your colleagues who are unable to attend today. We’ll also have time for questions at the conclusion of the presentation. So we ask that you please type your questions into the q&a box at the bottom of your zoom screen. And now I’m delighted to introduce our speaker for today’s webinar.

Christine Pfund is a senior 02:47 - scientist at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, and the Department of Medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. Pfund earned her PhD in cellular and molecular biology, followed by postdoctoral Research in plant pathology both at UW Madison. Dr. Pfund’s work focuses on developing, implementing, documenting and studying interventions to optimize research mentoring relationships across science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine. Dr. Pfund co-authored the original Entering Mentoring curriculum, and has co-authored many papers documenting the effectiveness of this approach. Dr. Pfund is the principal investigator of the National Research Mentoring Network Coordination Center.

She’s also the director of the Center for 03:33 - the improvement of mentoring experiences and research at UW Madison. She’s a member of the National Academies committee that recently published the consensus report an online guide, “The Science of Effective Mentorship in STEM M. Welcome Dr. Pfund. Christine Pfund: Great thanks to Selena and Brittney and Anne for the invitation and the help in bringing this to you. I am going to share with my screen. There we go. All right, wonderful. Hopefully, you can all see that. So today, I’m going to be sharing with you in our brief time together, some of the work that we’ve been doing that hopefully will be of use to you as you think about ways to optimize your practice of mentorship for your research teams. Selena Connealy: Just a moment, Dr. Pfund. We’re seeing your…we’re seeing your screen with your notes attached to it. Christine Pfund: Well, how interesting. Let me reshare that. One moment, please. Brittney Van Der Werff: Same.

04:56 - Christine Pfund: How about that? Brittney Van Der Werff: Oh, there we go. Christine Pfund: All right. Wonderful. Great. Thanks for pointing that out. So today, yeah, so hopefully be sharing with you some things that help you optimize your practice. And I think it’s important to say I absolutely want to honor the fact that hopefully many of you have been experienced mentors or maybe newer to mentorship or definitely have the experience of being a mentee across the board and honor that you we have a range of experiences. And we’ll talk a little bit about that. But we come from a platform in our work that all everyone’s practice can be improved and optimized. And that’s really the nature of our discussion today.

So first, I 05:40 - just like to learn a little bit more about you. And so I thought we’d do that using a poll. So let me go ahead and launch this poll. And so what I’d love to see here is what career stage folks are at who are attending today. And so you can just click on your response. I’ll be able to share with you and I have created an other category. I apologize in advance. If you are not listed and I’ve missed your category, you only have 10 responses. So I was limited. So we’ll give folks another minute to respond or maybe 30 seconds. All right. Great. So let me share those results with you. So we have a range of folks today, ranging across different stages of being faculty members, four program coordinators or managers and one other. So thanks. Nice to know who’s here today. Let me close that. Alright, so another question is, I want to honor the fact we’re all living in all of these different online engagements. And so I just wanted to give folks a chance to take a moment to think about what they’re coming into the webinar feeling this afternoon or morning if you are on the west coast.

And so I think that it is just this poll I’m going 07:11 - to put up now. And again, just be honest, it’s just helpful to know where you are and you’re thinking this morning if you’re distracted, if you’re struggling, if you’re looking forward to taking an hour mentorship and thinking about nothing else, or you don’t want to share. All right, I’ll give it another couple seconds. All right. And of course, Selena, if there’s anything I’m seeing that you’re not seeing, let me know. So I’ll share those results. And so [indecipherable words], you know, honoring the fact that some of us are distracted about what’s happening around you, and you’re doing your best just to be here and we honor that, others are looking forward to just taking their mind off everything and then diving into mentoring as a topic.

Even taking time for your own 08:18 - professional development can be a struggle under the current circumstances. And some of us are not quite sure. I like to say I’m hour to hour these days. And of course, it was your option to share. So thanks for sharing that. And just acknowledging where folks are at. Alright, right. So I wanted to just start to say that there’s a lot of research on mentoring.

And I won’t go through all of these studies, 08:47 - but just to say that mentoring matters, we know that strong mentorships enhance to a lot of measurable outcomes including enhanced science identity, sense of belonging, self efficacy in many domains, including research, persistence in a given careers degree lens, researchn productivity, career satisfaction and enhanced recruitment and persistence of those from traditionally underrepresented groups. And we also know that despite how important mentoring is, we know there’s a very uneven research mentoring landscape. So we know that folks from traditionally underrepresented groups and even white women’s mentorship requests are often ignored more than those by white men. We know that in general, there’s many studies that have shown that folks from traditionally underrepresented groups receive less mentoring than their non-minority peers. And we also know in one of the very famous studies from Donna Gyntherin her and her colleagues, was that minority investigators indicate that inadequate mentoring post obstacles to obtaining funding and there was a study done that, in fact, with all things held constant 35 different variables, folks from underrepresented groups received R01 funding from the National Institute of Health at a lower rate and mentorship and lack of mentorship was one of the reasons cited.

10:05 - So this has caused a huge national focus in the last decade on mentoring. And so I won’t go through all of these but just to give you a sense from the at the National Science Foundation, we have a lot of focus and programs on mentorship and raising its visibility. Private foundations like the Sloan Foundation, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute have invested a lot in exemplary mentoring programs and requirements for the training of the mentors and mentees that they support. The National Academy of Sciences has had three reports that highlighted specifically mentoring and I’ll specifically talk about the one Selena mentioned, that was on the science of mentorship. And then the National Institutes of Health have really focused on mentorship in their feeling of individual development plans.

They have new requirements for 10:53 - their training grants that mentors have to have some type of mentor training, and have put a lot of money into the National Research mentoring network. I’m one of the PIs. So I thought that it might be useful to spend a little bit of time talking about some of the findings from this newly released report on the science of effective mentorship in STEMM. Now, the second M here stands for medicine. So they have science, technology, engineering, math, and medicine. And this report was released at the end of October last year.

So the first 11:22 - thing is, is there even a science of mentorship and in the sense that science is an intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of structures and behaviors - it is! There is a science to mentorship. And what the science of mentorship does is it brings together multidisciplinary perspectives all the way from organizational and social psychology to discipline based education, and brings all of those disciplinary perspectives to bear on understanding what are effective behaviors in mentorship, the theoretical frameworks around mentorship, measures and assessments around mentorship, tools for mentorships, structure of mentorship and the role of the institution and programs like EPSCoR in promoting effective mentorship. So I won’t go through the entire report, but I wanted to tell you that if you haven’t seen this report, there are chapters on what mentorship is how identity affects mentorship, disciplinary context of mentorship, the role of mentorship in medical education, which might not be as relevant to this group, but just it is part of it, the work of programatic mentorship and the role of the institution creating an effective culture of mentorship. And there is a large literature review in each of these areas in the report. This is the committee who conducted the study and I had the honor and privilege of being one of those folks.

It was chaired by my dear friend and colleague, 12:48 - Angela Meyers Winston and supported by many agencies, including the National Academies. So one of the things that the committee put forth is this are lots of definitions out there about mentoring and mentorship. And the first thing I want to highlight is we spent a lot of time on the committee struggling with the definition. And what we came up with and want to promote is a move from the word mentoring to mentorship to honor that it takes both mentor and mentee in the relationship to have it be effective. And when we only talk about mentoring, we don’t honor the important role that mentees play in that relationship.

So we have put forth that mentorship 13:28 - is a professional working alliance in which individuals work together over time to support the personal and professional growth, development and success of the relational partners (so the mentor and mentee) through the provision of career and psychosocial support. And I want to highlight this is both career support. So the kind of career guidance, skill development and sponsorship that many of us engage in and mentoring but also the cycle social support, which is just as important. It’s that emotional support and role modeling that are aimed at helping mentees to develop their talent. And mentorship complements lots of other developmental processes like coaching, and teaching, and helping mentees develop skills and knowledge that are essential to this holistic development of STEM professionals and stem identity development.

So what I 14:17 - thought is using that definition of mentorship and thinking about your own roles and mentoring is I’m curious, and I’ll put a poll up, by that definition, how many folks would you say you are currently mentoring. And I had broad categories from zero to more than 20 here. Just a couple more folks to vote. Great. All right. So what we can see is in this group, we have a huge range of folks who are not currently mentoring by that definition. And that may be just the the role that you’re in. And you have other interactions with mentees and responsibilities to one individual who’s mentoring more than 20 folks on by this definition, which is a huge honor and responsibility and everything in between. So thank you for sharing that.

And I 15:36 - think you know, when you think about collectively, just the folks on this webinar, if we were to add up all these folks, you’re collectively mentoring so many people and the, again, the privilege and responsibility that comes with that, and also your commitment, even attending this webinar to help optimize that practice and that impact. So in the report the other thing is we wanted to honor the fact that mentorship occurs in lots of structures. So we have a classic dyad. So you might imagine yourself as mentor working with one mentee. So let’s say myself working with an undergrad or Selena working with a graduate student, that would be in a classic dyadic relationship. There are all of these other structures. There are triads in which we might have a mentor working with a graduate student and that graduate student working with an undergraduate or high school student.

Now you’re in a very 16:31 - interesting triadic relationship. Or you might have collective or group mentoring at the programmatic level where mentees are getting mentorship from multiple mentors as well as peer mentoring or near peer mentoring. And then you can move into these huge networks of mentoring where you’re working with individuals as well as resources that kind of compile and meet all of your mentorship needs. And so, a lot of the investigation around mentorship has really focused on the classic dyad but I think where we see the movement mentorship is really to these much more complex organizational structures around mentorship, so that mentees can get all of the things that they need in order to develop and advance. And one way to think about that is there’s a lot of things and attributes that are needed for effective research, mentoring relationships.

And this is one of the organizational structures 17:19 - we pulled together for a report we published in 2016. So you might think about in your mentorship, you might play a lot of roles in the research arena, helping mentees develop disciplinary skills, learning the discipline, assessing their understanding of the discipline. You might play roles in interpersonal skills, actively listening to them building that trust and widening expectations. And then there’s this whole domain of social psycho social skills, so providing motivation, helping them build research and career self efficacy or confidence, building their identity as scientists and sense of belonging. And then there’s a whole domain of diversity cultural skills, how do we help them reduce the impact of bias and stereotype threat in their experience in our relationships.

18:03 - How are we culturally responsive to our trainees? And then sponsorship skills. So how do you foster independence? How do you help mentees build networks? Now, when I look at this list, I don’t know about you, but myself as a mentee, or mentor sometimes go, Oh, my gosh, I can’t fulfill all of these roles. And one of the benefits of really moving towards articulating needs is when mentees can tell us what they need in a given time. And we can tell mentees what we can provide and what we can’t provide. And then they can look at their whole mentoring network going back to this mentoring now networks, like say are all of my needs, getting met by the collective and not putting all of those needs and meeting those needs into one individual.

And 18:49 - that is a much more supportive structure for a mentee than a single mentor offer a single mentee. So the other thing on these attributes is how do we learn how to do it? All of these seems well? Or how do we even learn how to do a subset of them well and optimize our practice. Where just that mentorship education come from. So what we know though, is the need to be effective mentors because when mentorship is less effective, and mentors are not at they’re absent or they have unrealistic expectations, or they don’t provide clear and relevant guidance, or horribly engage in manipulative, inappropriate behavior, what we get are negative mentoring experiences. And what’s really important is that negative mentoring experiences can also come from otherwise good intentions.

So we 19:38 - as mentors might have really good intentions, but when they’re not implemented effectively, they can have negative experiences. And so while I think it’s really important to think about, we may have a certain set of skills as mentors that can be optimized, we also might have a set of good intentions that need to be addressed so that we can implement those intention effectively for our trainees and mentees. And you’ll Hear me interchange that word trainee and mentee to mean the same thing. But just some folks like one word better than the other. The other thing that the report struggled and with was how identities affect mentorship and to dive into that literature.

So 20:14 - we know that identity plays a pivotal role in the formation and development of social relationships and mentorship is a social relationship. And so specific dimensions of identity like science, identity, and cultural identity, are empirically linked to academic and career development and the experience of the mentoring relationship in STEM. So mentorship has this incredible opportunity to ameliorate negative effects of students feelings of being other, due to their non science identities and stem by increasing inclusion and psychosocial support. We know that as mentors, we’re trying to help them build science identity, and if we can help them also integrate that with their cultural identity, we can help increase sense of belonging, sense of their own science identity, how they see those identities intersect, and a sense of belonging. So that’s an incredibly important area of growth.

And one of the things that the report speaks to is the 21:14 - need for culturally responsive mentoring. So this is a learned set of skills in which all of us, regardless of our race or gender and lived experience can show interest in in value a student’s cultural background and social identity. We don’t have to have lived it to be culturally responsive. And this can help our mentees navigate invalidating experiences in the academy and affirm their sense of belonging within a stem context and reinforce their belief in their own ability to be successful in the STEM context. And there’s a lot of work that’s being done around how to be more culturally responsive in your mentorship.

So one of the things in light of 21:53 - that is I wanted to just take a moment and ask you for those of you who are mentoring and acknowledging that four of you said you’re not. So you can decide whether to answer this or not. But for those of you in particular mentoring, what’s the biggest challenge in your mentoring relationships currently? And I realized the challenge may be different in different relationships. So you can think about one or you can think across all of them. So just pick one I know that you might want to check all but if you have to choose one, what’s the biggest challenge right now?…give folks another 10 seconds… All right.

So I’m going to share these with you 23:15 - and you can see amongst your colleagues on this webinar is we’re all have challenges in different areas of time being the biggest one. And I think the important thing about that is acknowledging it takes time to be a good mentor. And I think that in some ways, it’s often very difficult because we want to be effective and we just can’t find the time. And so even having conversations about what time you have or don’t have with your mentees can really go a long way to addressing the next challenge, aligning expectations, and then communication, independence, addressing equity, inclusion, motivation, all of these is that in each of our relationships, we will ebb flow with where these are challenging and where we feel we have skills and confidence to address those challenges and where we really need some tools and resources? All right, I’m going to close that poll. All right. So one of the things is I want to acknowledge is that institutions and programs have a huge role in recognizing and addressing barriers of implementation. And this was raised in the report.

24:24 - And so we have to address the fact that institutions need to be able to address the challenges of time, which was pointed out in the poll, resources, making effective mentorship, rewarded, and incentivizing it, building expertise on our campuses and programs around mentorship, and helping people have confidence to implement new and evidence based practices. So I want to just honor that you may have the best intentions and be able to put the time in and dedicate to having effective practices, but acknowledging that we’ll only get so far if our institutions don’t address some of these barriers that are listed here, and that was a big point in the report National Academies. Some of the things that institutions can do and programs can do and I applaud EPSCoR at New Mexico for taking this on, is what can we do just to support more effective mentorship in your own campus and program? And one of the things you can do is providing mentorship education, and providing and promoting the use of mentorship tools. And that’s what I want to spend the next 10 minutes or so is letting you know where you can get information and tools to help you advance your own practice. And that’s really been the heart and soul of the work that my colleagues and I have the opportunity to engage in over the last 15 plus years.

So I 25:46 - will tell you right off the bat that the National Academies report on the science of mentorship is a long 300 plus page report. And I know you all want to go out and read the whole thing. But as many National Academies report is, it’s pretty hard to do that. And so what this report and committee did is we also built an online guide. And this is going to give you the shorthand to the report and access to all of the tools including the mentorship education tools that I’ll discuss with you. They’re all linked from this guide.

And 26:16 - I have in the slides here, circled in orange, how to find that guide. And the online toolkit that was developed by our committee is here. And what you can see is that it breaks down the report. Gives an overview of the report about why mentorship matters about the report and the recommendations. It has things that shows you mentorship functions, it has forms of mentorship, just like the slide I showed you from the report, things on culturally responsive mentoring, how to ameliorate negative mentoring experiences.

Then it has a whole 26:47 - section on mentorship education, and program assessment and then a whole section on mentoring tools. And so for example, under the Tools and this is a little hard to see, but there would be a whole section on actions, research training, and graduate program directors could take. So there’s a whole series of actions and tools. And then I’ll take you through some of the tools more specifically. One set of the mentorship education tools that are listed here that we’ve worked on will take you to the simmer website.

And this is the center of improvement, a 27:20 - bunch of experiences and research called CIMER. The website is just cimerproject.org, and it’s linked from that national academy site. And this is the center that we have developed (and I direct) and it’s meant to provide resources and organizations and institutions with resources and services to support their improvement of research, mentoring relationships. And what this center does is we provide mentor and mentee training and facilitator training for those who want to implement mentorship education, but we also have become a central collection for evidence based curricula are all freely available, which I’ll tell you about for mentors and mentees for mentorship education. We have evaluation tools and an evaluation platform, and many, many resources that you can use to advance mentorship education, including virtual mentorship programs, materials for mentors and mentees and even Songs as Case Studies to help foster conversations around mentorship.

28:21 - So the core curriculum, as Selena said in my introduction, is Entering Mentoring curriculum. It’s a process based curriculum that has case studies and problem solving. It’s aimed at awareness racing across a standard set of competencies. These competencies should look familiar because they were built around the needs of mentors in which they were having challenges just like we showed in the poll. So how do you better align expectations? How do you maintain effective communication and so forth? There is also a validated assessment tool across all of these competencies.

In case of a 28:58 - mentorship education is implemented. And you want to assess it. And we have had the resources from many agencies across the country and time and privilege to study it extensively, including conducting a randomized control trial of this particular approach to mentorship education. All of the mentor training curriculum based on Entering Mentoring are available on the website and free. And we’ve adapted across multiple disciplines and career stages. So if you want a full curriculum for all of those competencies for the mentors of undergrads in engineering, we have it.

If you 29:39 - want the full curriculum in mathematics, we have it. And these were developed by tons of people across the country who live in those disciplines. You can download full curriculum, you can also build your own. So every curricula is tagged by career stage of the mentee and discipline in competency. So if you just want a case study to talk about in your research group that addresses how you can all foster independence better, you can just find one activity and download it from the website.

We also have worked with partners this project is 30:16 - led by my friend and colleague Janet Bradshaw on mentee training curricula. Across all of these five areas of training development are over almost 100 evidence based activities for undergrads and graduate students to help them in their holistic development as trainees including how to optimize their mentoring relationships. All of these materials are also available on our website for you to download and use. I will say that on our website are also many more resources in addition to what the CIMER team and affiliates have developed, including resources for mentees, free online asynchronous trainings for mentors, example mentoring compacts, or expectation documents, example individual development plans. So it’s a lot to take in. But basically what we’ve tried to do is serve the nation by bringing all of these things together all of these evidence based approaches to improving and optimizing mentoring relationships.

I also want to 31:18 - draw your attention to the National Research mentoring network, nrmnet.net. This is a virtual platform for mentors and mentees. there is a whole platform with structured guided mentorship that you could have trainees go to, if they want additional mentors in their network, you could sign up as a mentor to others. There is a whole library of things for mentors and mentees that have to do with development of training. And then there’s a whole social networking platform for mentors and mentees to engage in you can even set up your own group.

So 31:53 - if New Mexico EPSCoR wanted to set up a group on this platform for mentors and mentees to engage it has all the functions of social networking platforms as well as opportunities to video conference and well and it’s all free. Yeah, go ahead… Brittney Van Der Werff: This is Britney, we have a question from a participant, “Is it okay to share screenshots of your slides with colleagues on Twitter?” Christine Pfund: Absolutely. Thank you so much for asking. Awesome, thank you. Yes, share away, the more the merrier. I will also just say that the Council of Graduate Schools, which you may or may not, it’s not a website I used in my practice early on, but have come to appreciate if you’re doing any work with graduate students, what they have up on mentoring is amazing, including this great mentoring and graduate school guidebook. And so these are again things that we also have listed on the CIMER website and are referred to in the National Academy toolkit. So I know that that is a lot In 30 minutes, but what I wanted to give you on Selena and Brittney’s invitation was an overview of the fact that there’s a lot going on nationally about mentorship.

Because what we want all at the 33:14 - end of the day is to optimize the talent development and training of mentees across career stages and in disciplines, and that you’re not alone in wanting to optimize your practice. And there are tons of tools out there. Many folks around the country, including our team have tried to pull those together for you. And we wanted to leave the rest of the time for folks to ask questions either about what’s available to you, or what’s what you’re wondering if it’s available to you. Challenges in your own relationships that we could open for conversation in terms of best approaches and troubleshooting. So I’m going to pause there and turn it over to the team who’s going to elicit our Q&A.

34:05 - Brittney Van Der Werff: Yeah! So we have a we have a question already from Julia Fulgrum. And she’s asking, do you have specific recommendations from the mentoring tools for faculty who are mentoring faculty? Christine Pfund: Yeah, so that is a great question. I’ll mention two things that we do have. I’m going to go back a couple slides. So in the mentor training curriculum, there actually is an entire curriculum for a faculty who are mentoring junior faculty. It is in the Clinical and Translational Science domain, but it is incredibly translatable. So things like how to have good communication between junior and senior junior faculty with their senior mentors. How to align expectations.

How to foster independence, and we have many 35:03 - adaptations of case studies across disciplines. So many of those things are in there. The other big thing is examples of individual development plans, which I think are incredibly effective at that career stage in particular, because a lot of the mentorship at that career stage is really focused on career development, career exploration, career commitment, grant writing, and so there are many tools in that regard. The National Academies report that if, if you are familiar with those reports at all, they have specific charges. The committee was charged with examining the literature around the mentorship of grad students and postdocs, not of grad students and undergrads, not of postdocs and junior faculty, but many of the things can be applied. But yes, there are specifics. And I would say that in terms of, let’s say, mentorship of junior faculty, let’s say in engineering and computer science, we do not have many of those things posted.

But we are very aware of some 36:09 - incredible work going on in those domains. Others on this call may know as well. And you’re welcome to email me and I can direct you specifically to some colleagues in those arenas that are doing some really spectacular work. Brittney Van Der Werff: Outstanding. Thank you. Your next question, Chris is from another participant. And it addresses a relatively delicate situation, “It seems like different academic systems in different countries have different approaches and cultures of mentorship. What do you think are the best resources for students and professors that have experienced different approaches to mentorship than those you’ve defined here, but are operating within the US context?” Christine Pfund: Yeah, so can I ask if the person can respond in the q&a Now is, is there a particular career stage of mentee we’re talking about? Because my answer will be slightly influenced if we’re talking about the mentoring of undergrads and management of grad students or other career stages. So…

37:13 - Brittney Van Der Werff: All it sounds like… I know that’s not helpful. But.. Christine Pfund: Yeah, that’s a lot. Um, so…I’m gonna give a general answer and then a couple follow ups with specific things that are really excellent out there. So I think just the nature of the question when when, folks, I want to applaud the fact that there’s an acknowledgement that there exists a culture of mentorship, I think it’s something we don’t often talk about. And even in the US when we do work with other institutions. One of the things that is really important is when people start talking about, well, “our culture of mentorship” is taking a moment and saying, “what is that?” because one of the things in programs and institutions is a first step and even being able to say what tools and resources would be useful or we could extrapolate from is having folks struggle with what do we mean when we say our culture of mentorship? So I will give an example.

I was recently working 38:19 - with, I’ll just say an Ivy League institution on the East Coast, which will remain nameless. And they were talking about what could they do across their graduate programs that would appeal to and be relevant across disciplines. So humanities, and engineering, and computer science and the arts and, you know, introduced discipline here and would acknowledge, they had international students, they had national students, all of it. And in the course of the discussion, people were saying, well, that won’t work for that culture, that won’t work for that culture. And what we decided was the first thing they needed to do - let’s go back to the programs they were trying to work with and say what draw us a picture of what you think your mentoring structure is? And what do you think your culture of mentorship is? That alone can be an incredibly powerful exercise.

So for example, when you say the 39:16 - mentors of graduate students in your department or your institution…Who’s doing that mentoring? Is it just within the program? Are their mentoring networks? What do you think you mean, when you say the culture is supportive or not supportive of mentorship? What do you mean when you say it’s competitive, not competitive? What do you mean by the difference of advisor versus mentor? Who’s in the role of evaluator versus support system or are those always completed? So those are just a couple examples of questions that in an umbrella is that activity alone, I think is the most critical first step before what a lot of folks do is they jump into, “Well, let’s address the differences in cultures of mentorship” when they haven’t even defined what their cultural is. So that’s not an easy thing to do. And it’s also really insightful to get mentees to weigh in, whether that’s by survey. That’s by just talking to them informally by focus group, what they think the culture of mentorship is. There are also some really wonderful assessment tools that are developed being validated now that can help an institution get at that.

Then once you have 40:21 - somewhere to start, you can start pressing on how is this the same or different in this department, in this institution, in this country, as a starting point, so that’s kind of my umbrella because I think a lot of it is stepping back and starting to define otherwise, what you end up is is very circular, non specific a morphic a morphus discussions. That said, there are clearly differences when we are mentoring international students who are here in the US and there are clearly important cultural differences when we are mentoring people who are abroad. And I will say that for the first point, the best thing that I have seen out there is from the University of Michigan, and I believe it’s on our CIMER site. If not, I can send it to a Selena a pass along on mentoring international students. I’m really, really well done really great stuff there. I have less stuff out there.

And our work is 41:17 - largely focused on mentorship in the US on mentoring folks who are abroad. But there are some colleagues working on some really great programs that we could certainly put you in touch with, that are building some virtual online mentoring programs in which mentors from the US and internationally are mentoring one another. And that’s probably the best place to go in terms of because they’re living that kind of experience. So I’ll pause there and see if I’ve touched upon at least the different variety of of that answer because that’s a big question. Brittney Van Der Werff: It was a very big question.

I think you 41:50 - gave a solid answer and provided resources for people to investigate further. We have another. All right. “Much of advice I’ve received around mentorship sounds more like service. And if, as if mentoring only builds the career of the mentee and is something a mentor provides as a good member of the scientific community, but most of the time, the mentor is also looking for something from the mentee, as well. Usually in the form of research work. Faculty usually can’t afford to think of a mentee, ie grad students only as recipients of our effort. Do you have ideas about how to think about this relationship as more mutually beneficial and therefore more sustainable? Christine Pfund: So I’ll I think I’ll say two things about that.

42:43 - I want to start from first the mentoring as service and the National Academies report does speak to this and has some work on on how to make mentoring count. So I want to start from the valuing perspective. So there’s a lot of conversations that are happening now about what just mentoring count towards. It often counts towards service, especially faculty, mentoring faculty in other domains that counts as teaching. So they see mentorship of undergrads as part of undergraduate education.

And and yet not given teaching credit 43:17 - for it, which is where we get into where does it count? What is the mutual benefit? Why would we do it? And then the really interesting part is how infrequently it counts towards research. And yet mentorship is the fundamental research. mentorship is driving the research enterprise, especially at the Graduate postdoc level. And how often it’s not included in counting towards that when we’re talking about kind of the standard three legs of the promotion and tenure stool. That is a conversation that I think we’re going to see a lot of interesting push and change in the next decade. Because if you think about it,is if mentorship can start to count in all three domains.

So imagine being able to think about mentorship and 44:06 - how it’s driving the research enterprise and being able to count it in that domain of your work. And in the teaching domain, where you might be working with undergrads or others, in terms of kind of education of them and having some kind of accounting and I say credit, but I mean that in the broadest sense, but then in the service domain, if you’re leading a training grant, you’re leading a program like EPSCoR, you’re talking about mentorship at a whole different level at the programmatic level. And we have yet I think, in the science of mentorship to think, at the institutional level, how to make work count. So that’s kind of one end of it, because there’s making it mutually beneficial, but part of that mutual benefit being beneficial is also what it counts towards and how it’s valued. So that’s one piece. Lots I think lots of interesting things happening and things to think about where you might want to push at your own institution.

On the other hand, I think that 45:02 - it is important even in our own reflection to think about how mentorship is mutually beneficial in our own practice, because it helps us also say yes and no to agreeing to be a mentor. Mentoring undergrads is probably not going to yield in most cases, a huge amount of research results. It can. But that, but it’s often the exception. It is really investing in talent development at a very early career stage. Graduate students is really driving the research enterprise. Now grad students mentoring undergrads is also professional development for those grad students so you can start to think about the system.

So the one thing in terms of thinking 45:42 - about mutually beneficial it gets back to also mentee training. Is what are they hoping to get out of it? And is that aligned with what you’re able to provide in terms of a learning opportunity? And having those conversations early, because if the answer is “no” better to say no to that opportunity, than to say yes, because then you get into a place where it’s drawing on your time, the system isn’t set up for either of you to get out of the relationship, what you expect or need. And so having there are tools actually on one of the resource sites that I shared, that it’s about questions you and your mentee should ask before you commit to the relationship, because I think has to be done very early. Because it’s the reality is sometimes it is mutually beneficial, sometimes not. But mentees have to think about what they’re expecting to and mentors do too, so that you’re on the same page. So that’s kind of three levels.

I think there’s an 46:35 - institutional level of it being valued. I think there is a relational importance about are you going to both be on the same page that what you want to get out of it. And there’s a reality to that. And then I think there’s a lot of individual reflection and and there’s tools for that individual reflection as well. Brittney Van Der Werff: Wonderful. Thank you for that detailed response! I put out a last call for questions. And so we will give everyone maybe 30 seconds to let us know, probably a little less…

47:16 - Christine Pfund: And I’ll just put this up as folks are thinking of last questions, because obviously, the scope of work that I’ve shared today is not work I’ve done myself. This is the work of hundreds of folks across the country from many different groups and many different institutions and funding entities. And so I just want to acknowledge all of that, and the opportunity to share some of it with you. Brittney Van Der Werff: Sweet, and it looks like you’ve answered all of our questions! Thank you. Unknown: Great, and I guess unless it is Selena, can and can I ask you or are there certain things that you are hoping for from a programmatic perspective in terms of moving things forward, while we have some of your wonderful mentors online.

48:03 - Selena Connealy: Thanks for that, that talk you gave us an incredible amount of food for thought. So it’s hard to even formulate where we might start next. And maybe that’s our question. There are so many mentoring resources out there. Where would you suggest we might take a first step as a project with multiple universities and multiple kinds of mentors? Christine Pfund: Yeah, so I guess I would ask and asking, please don’t hear it as a judgement of something you should have done. I’m just curious, as has there been any outreach to mentees that are part of a program about their satisfaction with the mentorship they’ve received and any areas of need or interests that would improve their experience. I’m a fan of starting where your trainees are, broadly, because usually there’s a couple things that come to the surface.

If you 49:01 - have or haven’t that can really help decide where you want to spend the precious little time you have in advancing those relationships. So that might be one place, is you know, adding, even if you do kind of annual assessment of the folks that are part of the program broadly is including… I’m happy to suggest some based on what’s being asked nationally. Just some questions about what’s working, what’s not working, what what mentors and mentees would like that would help their own experience in the program. And I would use that to drive much more fully than I would use anything else, because it’s your folks in their context.

And what’s the most important is 49:39 - what they need, not what the literature says that they think they should need. Because that once those are identified, there’s so many resources out there that can help you do a light touch or a deep dive. Once those things are identified. Selena Connealy: That seems really helpful. And we do ask those kind of questions, but I’d be super curious to hear a that other people ask goes in ways that are maybe more effective to open that dialogue. And we also have an opportunity. We work with a cadre of undergraduate students in the summer as an undergraduate research program, and really can. It’s a pretty high touch program.

And I think we can implement some of the 50:17 - things that you suggested right up front. And that starts next week for us. So it’s perfect timing. So really appreciate that. So with that, o… Christine Pfund: There are lots of opportunities to to engage in bringing some of these evidence based approaches including the mentor and mentee training curricula up to the program, either online or face to face, including facilitator training events, and all of that. And again, all the materials that we’ve curated and developed are free. And then there are also services that can be provided if you want to go deeper than what’s provided for free. So try to make we want people to just take it and run with it, but we also acknowledge that sometimes both say, “I don’t feel ready o do that and want to hono where Selena Connealy: Well, thank you so much.

This has been an 51:07 - incredible learning experience for us. And I think it’s really going to set us off on a great direction and really improve our mentoring experiences and our, our mentors and going forward in the future. And also, please, we can share this with others after the fact. So we really appreciate that. And we have great gratitude for you taking time to share these resources with us and your expertise. And we really, I really feel like we’ve been in in the presence of somebody who, who really understands and knows mentoring, and we appreciate all of your work on this. Thank you for your time and your expertise.

51:41 - Christine Pfund: Great, thanks for the opportunity. And I’ll just say a special wave, some familiar names that I saw in the participant list, who I’ve had the pleasure of meeting. Nice to see you online. Selena Connealy: Well, thank you so much. And just as a reminder, we will be posting this webinar on our website. And that will be available to folks sometime early next week, I think. Appreciate everybody. And hope everybody has a good rest of your week. Thank you much .