Let’s Talk About Ph.D. Student Mentoring

What is mentoring, what are the hallmarks of a successful mentor-mentee relationship, and how do we know if we are achieving such a relationship?

These are the questions we set out to answer last year, in the company of six Duke faculty-graduate student pairs from six Ph.D. programs across Trinity College.

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Research points to mentoring as critical for graduate student success and retention across disciplines. And while a large body of mentoring best practices and resources now exists to support academic mentors, this important activity remains largely an informal matter.

Across the academy, assumptions that mentors simply “know” or “will figure out” how to mentor govern practices within Ph.D. programs. The lack of shared norms, agreements, or practices around mentoring can be problematic for graduate students and faculty alike.

How can graduate students feel assured that they are receiving the mentoring they need to succeed? How can mentors know how best to support graduate students through some of the most formative and challenging years of their lives?

Under the auspices of the Trinity College Mentoring Assessment Fellows Program, we convened the faculty-graduate student pairs as a cohort throughout the academic year to discuss these thorny questions. Our initial goal for the program was to support Ph.D. programs in developing thoughtful methods to assess graduate mentoring, in ways that made sense for their program culture and academic discipline.

In other words, we sought ways to quantify and measure the effectiveness of graduate student mentoring. We asked each faculty-grad student pair to develop, in consultation with their Ph.D. programs, an assessment rubric for mentoring.

We collectively reached a clearer understanding of the small first steps necessary for initiating culture change and effectively improving the experiences of both mentors and mentees.

Did we achieve this ambitious program goal? We did not. The faculty-grad student pairs demonstrated consistent engagement with the program, and all took steps toward developing a mentoring assessment plan. But changing entrenched practices and cultures around mentoring — even informal ones — proved to be much harder than it first appeared. At the same time, we collectively reached a clearer understanding of the small first steps necessary for initiating culture change and effectively improving the experiences of both mentors and mentees.

Specifically, what did we learn? To help us answer this question, we sat down with four program participants, Gustavo Silva (associate professor of biology), Jack Chen (Ph.D. student in biology), Corina Stan (Bacca Foundation Associate Professor of English) and Katherine Carithers (Ph.D. candidate in English). We’ve threaded their insightful comments throughout this list.

Lesson #1

We can’t assume that everyone shares the same understanding of mentoring.

We kicked off the first cohort meeting with a rigorous discussion of what mentoring is. Because there is no one definition of mentoring — even beyond the academy — we realized how important it is for each Ph.D. program to define for themselves what mentoring is, and what successful mentoring looks like.

Silva and Chen, for example, developed a survey asking biology faculty and Ph.D. students to identify “the five most important skills and responsibilities of both mentors and mentees” (Chen). Based on the “disparate” survey replies from mentors and mentees alike, Silva and Chen quickly realized that “expectations about mentor-mentee relationships were not necessarily clear and consistent among faculty and graduate students” (Silva).

Lesson #2

Before we can assess mentoring outcomes, we need to clarify what mentoring is, and what it means to do it well.

As Silva notes, the Ph.D. Program in Biology is “now working to establish realistic [mentoring] guidelines and to find better ways to communicate expectations that align with the mission of the department and the criteria established by The Graduate School.”

While acknowledging the value of different mentoring approaches, Silva emphasized the importance of “developing baseline expectations for each program to ensure that all students have a supportive environment, which is more equitable and less dependent on faculty preferences and biases.”

Lesson #3

Even just talking about mentoring can be really hard.

Because academic mentoring tends to be ad hoc and idiosyncratic in practice — not unlike teaching — faculty might interpret calls for more uniform or consistent mentoring practice as a form of personal criticism.

Graduate students, who must navigate uneven power dynamics even within the most supportive programs, may also be hesitant to voice unmet needs or ask mentors to do things differently.

Each of the six faculty-grad student pairs needed to initiate conversations with their Ph.D. program colleagues about mentoring, with varying levels of success. Not coincidentally, the faculty-student pairs who made the most progress toward their goals faced fewer hurdles in initiating these conversations. There seemed to be a positive correlation between high levels of general trust and collegiality within a given Ph.D. program, and the ease around conversations about graduate mentoring.  

Lesson #4

Collegial conversations around mentoring are the way forward.

The most successful conversations proved to be worth the time and effort. According to Stan, the cohort meetings modeled “a collegial, nonjudgmental and supportive environment, in which mentoring was discussed thoughtfully, with understanding and respect for each department’s unique situation.”

Stan and Carithers, who developed a survey to uncover English Ph.D. students’ experiences of being mentored at different stages, expect the results to catalyze ongoing, productive conversations in their program. Faculty plan to discuss the results of the survey in an upcoming meeting. Questions about mentoring have also been added to the annual graduate student progress report template, to seed ongoing conversations about mentoring between individual mentors and mentees.   

Lesson #5

Mentoring can take many forms.

As the year progressed, the limits of the traditional, formal 1:1 mentoring model that so many Ph.D. programs rely on became increasingly evident. Participants gained new insights into creative and alternative ways to meet graduate students’ developmental needs.

Carithers, for example, “appreciated the focus on mentorship communities rather than a single mentor-mentee model [and] … the different roles that different mentors play and how their experience meshes together.” Against a more capacious definition of mentorship, some participants reported a heightened “awareness that much of the work we [Ph.D. program faculty] are already doing already has mentoring components” (Stan). These activities include seminars on dissertation-writing and portfolio conversations between grad students and faculty.

Lesson #6

Discussing mentoring with faculty and peers had a significant positive impact for individual graduate students.

Although our primary objective was to improve overall cultures of mentoring within Ph.D. programs, grad student participants gained unique benefits from cohort conversations for themselves and their career trajectories.

Chen reports becoming “much more aware of the importance of communicating expectations with my mentor from the start” and gaining “a more solid framework for evaluating what effective mentoring looks like and how I can apply that to my own mentoring in the future.”

In addition to gaining insights into different forms of mentoring, Carithers plans to be more intentional “in the way that I seek mentorship from my mentors; I’m able to reflect on the different dimensions to the guidance or feedback I’m seeking and more clearly communicate those goals.”

Questions

Our program lasted for a single year, and we could only engage a small fraction of Trinity College and Duke Ph.D. programs. We hope that others can benefit from the takeaways we share here. In particular, we offer the following sets of reflection questions.

These questions are not easy ones, nor is the act of mentoring itself. It “involves listening, responsiveness and attentiveness to people; also flexibility, creativity and no small measure of tact” (Stan).

Contact

If this list of questions generates further questions for you or your Ph.D. program, let us be your thought partners in helping to answer them.  

• For Trinity Ph.D. programs, please reach out to Justin Wright (justin.wright@duke.edu), dean of graduate education of Trinity College of Arts & Sciences. 
• Maria Wisdom (maria.wisdom@duke), assistant vice provost for faculty advancement, can field questions related to Ph.D. student mentoring in any department at Duke. 
• And Jennifer Hill (jennifer.hill@duke.edu), director, Office of Assessment, can be a great resource for any Trinity Ph.D. program ready to explore the nuts and bolts of mentorship assessment.

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Justin Wright was appointed to his current leadership role as dean of graduate education of Trinity College of Arts & Sciences in 2022, and has invested time and resources into improving the culture of mentoring in Trinity. Wright is a professor of biology in Trinity and professor in the Division of Marine Biology in the Nicholas School. His research specializes in the study of biological diversity and its impact on ecosystem function.

Maria LaMonaca Wisdom is assistant vice provost for faculty advancement. Formerly a professor of literature and a graduate student adviser, she is now an adjunct associate professor of the practice in the Program in Education at Duke. She is also a professional certified coach (PCC) through the International Coaching Federation.

Jennifer Hill is the director of the Office of Assessment in Trinity College of Arts & Sciences. She has served in the Office of Assessment since 2006. In her role, she conducts strategic planning for academic outcomes assessment in undergraduate education, coordinates the appropriate use of student data for assessment analytics, and provides assessment consultation to academic departments, faculty and staff.