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Mentoring Skills

Up to Essential Skills


Making the Right Moves: A Practical Guide to Scientific Management for Postdocs and New Faculty
A very impressive and comprehensive lab management manual put out by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
How to Mentor Graduate Students: A Guide for Faculty at a Diverse University
The Rackham Graduate School at the University of Michigan created this resource in response to numerous discussions with graduate students and faculty in various disciplines at the University of Michigan over a period of two years. It provides advice on establishing mentoring relationships based on mutual understanding and realistic expectations. It also features summaries of the challenges that face historically underrepresented and other student groups, as well as observations and suggestions for the ways faculty and students can address those challenges.
How to Succeed in Graduate School: A Guide for Students and Advisors
by Marie desJardins. "This paper attempts to raise some issues that are important for graduate students to be successful and to get as much out of the process as possible, and for advisors who wish to help their students be successful. The intent is not to provide prescriptive advice -- no formulas for finishing a thesis or twelve-step programs for becoming a better advisor are given -- but to raise awareness on both sides of the advisor-student relationship as to what the expectations are and should be for this relationship, what a graduate student should expect to accomplish, common problems, and where to go if the advisor is not forthcoming."
Adviser, Teacher, Role Model, Friend: On Being a Mentor to Students in Science and Engineering
"A new guide from the National Academy of Sciences offers mentoring advice for faculty, administrators, and all others who counsel science and engineering students. It also outlines specific steps that institutions can take to improve the quality of the mentoring that their students receive."
Mentoring Your Potential Successor
by Search Masters International recruiter Dave Jensen. Article focusing on the mentoring process for scientists, with a slant towards industry.
Preparing Future Faculty
"Preparing Future Faculty is a national network of academic leaders reshaping graduate education to include preparation for the full range of faculty roles subsumed by the terms teaching, research, and service. Participants observe and experience how these responsibilities can be carried out at a wide range of academic institutions with varying missions and diverse student bodies."