Communication and Guidance During an Evolving Relationship : Graduate School : UMass Amherst

"A hallmark of excellent mentorship is progressive change in the relationship." (from Johnson's On Being a Mentor)

As you move through the mentoring relationship with a student, the student should transition from being someone akin to an apprentice to being a colleague. As an advocate and guide for your student, consider these axes of development.

Academic development: This is the core of what faculty often think of when we first consider mentorship. Depending on the graduate program, necessary skills may include how to read the literature in the discipline; connect prior coursework with disciplinary research; plan and carry out research; and analyze results.
Communication skills: Mentees develop their skills in communicating with their mentor, their collaborators, funding agencies (through grant writing), and in presenting their research in different formats and to different audiences.
Leadership and professionalism: Mentees learn about the norms of their discipline and take increasingly more substantive leadership positions. These might include providing feedback on work or help in preparing for qualifying exams for their peers, taking leadership roles within their graduate program or in other parts of the University, or become a student member of a committee in a disciplinary society. Students going into industry or the public sector may seek out experience with those areas.
Career preparation: Mentees should become increasingly able to identify the knowledge and skills they need to succeed in their chosen career, to identify their own weaknesses, and to strategically seek opportunities to fill those gaps. Career preparation is addressed in detail in a later chapter.

How you support your mentee's development changes as they progress through their program. Remember that no one person can have all the answers! Strong mentorship also means being aware of other resources and directing mentees to them when appropriate, and helping them to establish a team of mentors. You may know next to nothing about careers outside of academia, for example, but the Office of Professional Development offers many opportunities for your mentee to pick up relevant skills.

Early in your graduate student's program

Academic development. Professors are experts in their disciplines. It is easy for experts to forget what a beginning student might know. What assumptions are you making about a new student's background knowledge, both about the intellectual framework of the work as well as the mechanics involved in how to do the work?

Ask questions about your student's classwork and prior research experience, framed in such a way so that the student knows that your goal is to help them identify and fill in gaps, rather than to judge them on what they do not know.
Inform students that asking questions is an essential, expected and respectful part of the learning process. Foster a culture where questions are welcome. Be aware that some of your mentees may come from backgrounds where questions are not encouraged, and they may need time and extra encouragement to acclimate to this aspect of U.S. academic life.
Be aware that students may experience difficulty in transitioning from very structured undergraduate work to less structured graduate work. You can help by working with them to develop short-term, concrete goals and strategies for measuring their progress.
Have an explicit plan for teaching the student how to acquire necessary skills. To help students develop technical skills, UMass mentors recommend having them watch someone else perform the task, do the task themselves, and eventually teach the task to others.
Check in with your mentee about how required coursework is going.
Encourage your mentee to connect with other faculty and students, both inside and outside their program, through social events, seminars, training workshops and graduate student organizations.

Communication skills. Early-stage graduate students will be learning how to interact with people in their research group, other students in their program, faculty teaching their classes, and other faculty mentors. You can help by stressing the importance of creating a network of mentors, among both peers (at different stages) and faculty members, and helping students learn where to go with questions on different topics.

The Office of Professional Development and the Office of Inclusion and Engagement offer a variety of programs to help students develop networking skills, improve their writing and presentation skills, craft compelling funding applications, and build a mentoring network.

Leadership and professionalism. At this stage, students are most likely beginning to learn the norms of the discipline, and observe how others behave in leadership roles. You can help by explicitly discussing norms and pointing out leadership roles that they may be interested in assuming later on.

The middle period of your graduate student's program

Academic development. At this stage, the student has completed most of the initial requirements and is deep into their research. With the easing of externally imposed deadlines such as exams and course requirements, some students struggle to make steady progress. You can help your student define goals that are challenging but within reach.

Schedule a meeting with your student at least monthly. Frequent contact with the advisor correlates highly with student success. For this meeting, agree with the student on an agenda in advance; be sure to allow time for the student to ask questions or share concerns.
Have an open-door policy within reasonable constraints determined by your travel and your own deadlines.
Consider both short-term and long-term goals in your discussion with your student. Demonstrate how you go about planning a project with a deadline (e.g., getting ready for a conference) and one without. The Office of Professional Development offers workshops on setting SMART Goals: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound.
Help your student set high expectations. At the same time, be pragmatic, and check in with your student about other responsibilities they may have in the same time frame. If your student misses a deadline, address it with them, find out what the reason was, and establish a new deadline. Recognize how life events (family needs, illnesses, other personal issues) may be affecting student progress, and provide advice aimed at moving forward despite constraints. (See advice for helping with writing issues later in this handbook.)
Provide honest feedback and constructive criticism on a regular basis. Don't offer negative feedback without offering a solution for the student to try.
Celebrate success and reiterate the value of failure. All too often academics let a moment of success go by without acknowledgment and move on immediately to the next task. Take a moment to publicly acknowledge successes, both small and large, of your students, be it getting a paper accepted or mastering a new research skill. Similarly, remind students that failures are essential data points that inspire new research directions and fuel innovative thinking.

Communication skills. At every stage, but especially at this period, you can intentionally help to demystify academia. This is especially appropriate for students who will be seeking an academic career, but it is helpful for any student to understand how a complex job works.

Model how you do tasks and involve your students as appropriate. Involve them in grant writing, demonstrate how you approach writing projects of different lengths, describe how you prepare for committee work, or invite them to watch you teach.
Think out loud about the decisions you make.

Leadership and professionalism. Recommend that your student complete an Individual Development Plan, or IDP, and update it regularly. First developed for STEM and later adapted to social sciences and the humanities, IDPs help students and postdocs set goals over the next 6-12 months that include research project goals, skill development goals, and career advancement goals based on self-assessment of their progress. For mentors, a good practice is to review with your mentee only the research project goals; sometimes students are reluctant to divulge professional aspirations and self- assessments that are addressed in other parts of the IDP. The IDP helps students see the big picture, focus their efforts, become empowered to actively direct their own planning, and become more productive. The Office of Professional Development offers workshops on completing an IDP.

Helping your student finish well

Academic development and communication: helping your students write. In mentoring training workshops, one of the most common frustrations we hear from advisors, regardless of discipline, is that many of their mentees encounter trouble with writing. In some disciplines, writing is parsed out over individual published manuscripts, which may be in more manageable chunks for the student. In others, the student writes one major piece of work, which can be especially daunting. In helping your students overcome writing issues, try the following:

Encourage your students to write as they go rather than saving the writing until the end.
Emphasize the importance of breaking large tasks into small goals (e.g., "Write the methods section for Experiment 2" or "Write a summary of these three references on Topic X" rather than "Work on dissertation"). SMART goals work for writing too!
Encourage your students to join or establish a writing group. It is not necessary that they share writing, but just hold each other accountable for their progress. Several writing groups, both online and in person, are in the Amherst area.
Books that might be inspirational while offering solid advice include Silva's How to Write a Lot, which identifies specious barriers to writing and offers firm instructions, backed up by data, on the importance of establishing a regular writing habit. Similarly, Write Your Dissertation in 15 Minutes a Day has helped UMass Amherst graduate students get their work completed. Sword's Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write draws on interviews with one hundred academic writers and is filled with many strategies to try out. Practical advice for both writers and mentors of writers can be found in How to Fix Your Academic Writing Trouble by Mewburn, Firth, and Lehmann.
Encourage your mentee to apply to a dissertation writing retreat held by the Office of Professional Development during summer and the January break, or to a writing retreat sponsored by the Graduate Student Senate.
Provide constructive feedback in 2-4 weeks or less. Address large issues in content and organization before copy-editing sentences.
The UMass Writing Center has well-trained tutors who can work with your student, and for larger projects, it is possible to meet with the same tutor repeatedly.
Encourage your students to take advantage of our institutional membership in the National Center for Faculty Development & Diversity, which offers dissertation writing support.

Academic development and communication: helping your students communicate orally. Regardless of their career goals, all students will benefit from presenting their research to appreciative audiences.

Support your students' presentations at disciplinary conferences, and structure their preparation so that there is adequate time for incorporating feedback from you and others.
Encourage your students to participate in events for broader audiences, such as the Three-Minute Thesis competition.
Encourage your student to attend OPD workshops that allow them to practice public speaking, "elevator pitches," and the like.

Professional development. Realize that your student may be shifting their efforts to finding the next position, be it a postdoctoral position, an industry career, a teaching- intensive job, or some other path. Job searching takes time, but a student with a job to look forward to is a student that is motivated to finish their degree.

Support your student in allocating time for the search process.
Introduce your student to any additional relevant members of your professional
networks.
Discuss with your student your timeline for writing letters of recommendation and be prompt with them.
Help your student through periods of discouragement. Remind them that failure is common—in fact, recently academics have been posting "CVs of failure" that list their rejections rather than accomplishments as a way to normalize failure.

A note about relationship boundaries

Professors sometimes struggle with the appropriate tone of the relationship with their students: some prefer to be more formal, and some more friendly. Evidence suggests that some personal disclosure by the mentor can help in forming a productive mentoring relationship (e.g., sharing struggles with being a person of color in academia with a mentee of similar background). However, a mentor/mentee relationship cannot be a typical friendship because of the power dynamic. A student may feel obligated to participate in social activities with, or do favors for, a mentor that they would otherwise decline. In addition, socializing more with one student will likely be viewed as differential treatment by other students. Many UMass mentors also avoid befriending mentees on some social media platforms in order to separate professional and personal relationships.

At UMass Amherst, there is a bright line that you cannot cross: faculty are prohibited from entering into a sexual relationship with any student or postdoc for whom the faculty member has any responsibility for supervision, evaluation, grading, advising, employment, or other instructional or supervisory activity. If you find that a relationship is evolving into something romantic, you must immediately disclose the relationship to your supervisor and take steps to remove yourself from any of the above roles. Here is the policy in full.

Remember that as a faculty member, you always have the power in the relationship, which means you are the person responsible for maintaining appropriate boundaries.

If serious conflicts arise between you and your mentee

Some mentor/mentee relationships do not work as planned. Sometimes a student realizes that their research interests pull them in a different direction and part ways from a mentor with no ill will; in other cases, the relationship degrades and becomes painful. Researchers on mentorship label a relationship as dysfunctional if the primary needs of one or both partners are not being met, the long term costs for one or both partners outweigh the benefits, or one or both partners are suffering distress as a result of being in the relationship (from Johnson's On Being a Mentor, which offers a detailed analysis). Possible causes are nearly endless, including unrealistic expectations by either party, jealousy, taking undue credit for the other's ideas, or over-involvement in personal lives.

Steps to take include slowing down the process and not responding out of anger or anxiety to a problem; evaluating one's personal contributions to the problem; considering ethical and professional obligations to the mentee; or seeking consultation with a trusted colleague or the Ombuds Office. The Office of Workplace & Learning Development offers in-person and online training for employees on developing relevant skills. Develop a proactive and compassionate response to your mentee. Throughout, document your interactions.

Recommended practices at the program level

Successful graduate programs have the following characteristics:

Providing settings for informal interactions between students and faculty that foster a sense of community, such as social hours, holiday parties, picnics, etc.
Ensuring that advisors have common expectations for students.
Many UMass Amherst programs have an annual review in which faculty beyond the student's advisor and committee provide an assessment of the student's progress. At the minimum, the student is given a thumbs up or down on their annual progress. Other programs offer a more extensive chance for the student to have a conversation with a group of faculty and get perspective beyond that of their committee, to ask questions, to provide feedback to the program about how well the program is working and about the advisor, and to have a role in guiding the review.
Providing opportunities for preparing for the academic job market, including mock interviews, practice job talks, workshopping letters of application, teaching portfolios, research statements, CVs, etc. Some programs on campus offer semester-long classes on how to succeed in job seeking.
In disciplines tied to industry or other non-academic areas, pull in invited speakers who can discuss strategies for getting a job.

Program characteristics shown to lead to poor mentoring relationships:

Some program characteristics have been shown to be detrimental to student success (drawn from On Being a Mentor). These include:

Encouraging students to compete for limited resources.
A disconnect between faculty and student priorities (e.g., faculty focused on publication and grants when a student is focused on preparing for a practitioner role)
Inequity across faculty in the unit in their mentoring loads.
Poor collegiality among the faculty.
Diffusion of training, such as when practicum experiences are farmed out with little oversight from the home program.
Infrequent opportunities for interaction among peers and with faculty (a particular concern for online and professional programs).

Additional resources

The following book goes into extensive detail about how to mentor effectively, and has interesting case studies as well as concrete suggestions at both the individual and programmatic level.

Johnson, WB. 2016. On Being a Mentor: A Guide for Higher Education Faculty. Routledge, New York.

Communication and Guidance During an Evolving Relationship