Graduate Student Mentoring Fellows Work to Improve Mentoring Relationships in Engineering

At the Graduate School, we understand that effective mentoring is essential to the recruitment, retention, and advancement of talented graduate students. That is why we established the Graduate Student Mentoring Fellow Program, which commenced in January 2022. This program seeks to implement a 3-year mentoring improvement process for advising relationships between faculty and graduate students in residential research programs. To aid in this effort, graduate student fellows and faculty fellows from across the university are selected to help identify the strengths and possible opportunities for improvements in the mentoring cultures of their respective colleges. Fellows are tasked with using this knowledge to influence or design programming on effective mentoring practices. One of this year's projects came from the College of Engineering, where three Graduate Student Mentoring Fellows and two Faculty Mentoring Fellows worked on creating an Individual Development Plan. This project focused on developing an academic and professional development tool tailored to new and advanced graduate students. Watch the videos below to learn more about this project, how it works, and why it's important. 

To learn more about the Graduate School’s Mentoring Improvement Initiative, please visit: https://www.purdue.edu/gradschool/mentoring/index.html