Description
For female students, mentors can range from former students (University of Nairobi in Kenya) to peer mentors (University of Ottawa in Canada) to faculty (University of Ghana, University of Minnesota Medical School in the US). Many mentorship programs are designed to facilitate experience sharing, relationship-building, and academic and career advising. Some programs hold networking and social events and skill-building workshops. The University of Ottawa’s peer mentoring program features over 100 undergraduate student mentors in 20 mentoring centers across the university’s departments and encourages graduate students to take advantage of peer mentoring to “stay motivated and committed until graduation.” Peer mentors may even be eligible to receive a mentoring scholarship of up to CAD $4,500. The University of Michigan in the US offers students free use of MentorNet, an external service that provides individual mentoring in science and engineering to undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students and junior faculty.
Many universities in the US and Canada also offer mentoring to female faculty. Mentoring for female faculty focuses on career advising, networking, skills development, and experience sharing. The University of Ottawa’s Centre for Academic Leadership coordinates the matching of mentors and mentees, who are encouraged to meet in person for 90 minutes at least monthly over the course of one year. The University of Minnesota Medical School has a wide-reaching faculty mentoring program, having developed a policy that all junior faculty members should have a mentor or mentoring team. The University of Michigan facilitates individual and/or group mentoring relationships through provision of resources (e.g., handbooks and directories of volunteer career advisors), open mentoring sessions, peer mentoring, and “zone mentoring,” in which senior leaders serve as resources for multiple faculty members in a particular area.
Examples
University of Minnesota Medical School's Faculty Advisor program
University of Michigan’s mentoring program for faculty
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