Introduction

The Graduate School at the University of Massachusetts Amherst is committed to creating positive, healthy, and productive advising relationships between faculty advisors and their graduate students and postdoctoral scholars. To that end, we have prepared this guidebook for faculty mentors. We recognize that mentor/mentee relationships are highly individualistic, and even experienced mentors might encounter new challenges with every new mentee. Thus, we've tried to organize this manual so that mentors can dip in and find what they need, although new faculty might wish to read it more thoroughly from the beginning.

This handbook draws heavily on the following sources. The University of Michigan Rackham Graduate School's "How to Mentor Graduate Students: A Guide for Faculty" is widely viewed as an excellent model and has been adapted across the nation; this handbook uses some of its language by permission. Johnson's On Being a Mentor: A Guide for Higher Education Faculty is especially comprehensive. In addition, we drew upon Pfund et al. (2014) and the excellent mentor training program established by the National Research Mentoring Network, including material both from printed work and from their in-person program. Shore's The Graduate Advisor Handbook: A Student-Centered Approach is also a good read. Other references are listed throughout. For readability and brevity, we opted not to have in-text citations but to provide sources as a list.

Good mentoring starts with each graduate program, and we have tried to "UMass-ify" this where possible, providing examples of effective strategies from many different programs. This is a living document, so if you have comments, criticisms, or examples of best practices to share, please contact the Graduate School.

While this handbook is meant to aid individual faculty as they work with their mentees, at the end of each section we offer some suggestions for best practices at the level of the graduate program.

Notes on language

Although much of this manual is relevant to the mentorship of postdoctoral scholars and undergraduate researchers as well as graduate students, we refer to mentees as "students" for ease of language.

We use the pronouns "they" and "their" as both singular and plural, as the most inclusive choice.