Mentoring Improvement Initiative

The Graduate School has initiated an improvement plan for mentoring in graduate education at Purdue University. Beginning in January of 2022, the Graduate School has engaged in an intensive examination of mentoring practices on campus to assess our current state and look for places where we excel and opportunities for change. Research indicates, effective faculty mentor–graduate student mentee relationships can have a profoundly positive influence on the academic and career trajectories of both mentor and mentee. We hope to engage in research to assess best practices and training to improve this important relationship.

The Graduate School is bringing theoretically-grounded, evidence-based, and culturally-responsive training opportunities to Purdue faculty, postdocs, and graduate students to optimize these critical, mutually beneficial, but sometimes informal and underperforming relationships. The training will offer faculty, graduate students and postdoc participants an operational definition of effective mentoring, a toolbox of resources to engage, train, and mentor graduate students, and methods to measure and evaluate the effectiveness of their mentoring. Faculty and graduate students will learn to align expectations, articulate a mentoring philosophy and plan, assess understanding, cultivate ethical behavior, enhance work-life integration, foster independence, maintain effective communication, and promote mentee research self-efficacy and professional development. Workshops will empower graduate students with knowledge of their rights and responsibilities as mentees, strategies for identifying and approaching prospective mentors, and resources to set realistic expectations, goals, and a plan for success.