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Faculty Mentoring within Academic Departments
Mentoring is an important mechanism to help junior faculty get on track and to impart sound advice about how to navigate the years leading up to tenure. It can be especially important for female and minority faculty to help combat social and professional isolation. Below are descriptions and comments about a few departmental mentoring programs at NCSU that faculty have brought to my attention. If your department has a particularly effective mentoring program, please let me know and I will add it to this list.
Soil Science: Mentoring committees in Soil Science address issues important in the
RPT process for Assistant and Associate Professors, and identify any
weaknesses in the Department’s support structure for these faculty.
Mentoring teams are assigned by the department head and consist of
three senior faculty members for each Assistant Professor. The team
members have a vested interest in the programs and success of that
faculty member, and the team works as her/his advocate for success
within the department. A mentoring team meets with the faculty member
at least twice per year, team members are available to the junior
faculty for consultation, and they help ensure that any concerns from other departmental faculty are addressed. Full Description
Forestry and Environmental Resources: This is a large department encompassing a wide variety of disciplines. The department has thus developed a mentoring program in which the faculty member, in consultation with the department head, chooses his or her own mentoring committee. A large part of the responsibility for establishing and meeting with the mentoring committee thus falls on the faculty member being mentored. At a minimum, the mentoring committee reviews and critiques the Statement of Mutual Expectations, thus making sure that the expectations of the junior faculty member, members of the departmental faculty, and the department head are all in alignment. If a relationship develops between the junior faculty member and members of the mentoring committee, the benefits may be much larger. Full Description
History: The History Department has a policy of voluntary group mentoring. Under this system, assistant professors meet for coffee or lunch twice a semester to discuss a predetermined topic, i.e. grant writing, graduate advising, publishing, balancing work and family, the tenure process. The assistant professors invite two or three senior faculty to join them for a conversation on a given topic based on their sense of who can offer the best advice. This system allows junior faculty to meet and learn from an assortment of senior faculty, contributes to the overall intellectual life of the department, and encourages individual relationships to develop. Full Description
Assistant Professors' Learning Community
The Assistant Professors’ Learning Community is an informal discussion group open to all faculty, with a special emphasis on issues of importance to assistant professors. The learning community will meet three times each semester to discuss topics related to teaching, research, and faculty life. It will provide an informal setting to meet other faculty and discuss issues of common interest to those who are teaching, conducting research, and working toward tenure.
The intent is to enhance faculty experience and provide an ongoing discussion group for faculty working toward tenure. Each meeting will focus on a different aspect of faculty experience and help make connections with people in many different spheres of the university.
- August 2009:Panel of Outstanding Teachers: What do you do to start the semester off right?
- October 2009: Tactics for getting grants funded beyond the technical content
- November 2009: Preparing a dossier
Archives of previous years' topics
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