Two-day workshop improves AU faculty mentoring practices

As part of Augusta University’s commitment to student success and faculty professional development, The Graduate School recently hosted a two-day training workshop through the Center for the Improvement of Mentored Experiences in Research, or CIMER, for faculty members from different disciplines within the university.

In turn, those who attended will use their new skills to develop a series of mentorship programs in collaboration with The Graduate School.

“Throughout my career, having the right mentor at the right time to help you and guide you in the right way has been critically important,” said Jennifer Sullivan, PhD, dean of The Graduate School and interim provost of Augusta University. “So, starting this program is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time.”

CIMER aims to improve mentor-mentee working relationships and experiences by offering research-based workshops.

Top-level scholars at the University of Wisconsin have studied cultural changes to help individuals, institutions and organizations develop more equitable and mutually beneficial mentor-mentee relationships.

Two years ago, AU hosted a one-day CIMER workshop focused on the principles of mentoring, but the recent two-day training called Entering Mentoring was a chance to train faculty members to help their colleagues learn more effective mentoring strategies. 

Train the trainer, if you will.

“We’re giving them tools to become better mentors, how to maintain effective communication, how to align expectations and what they can do to have a better relationship with their mentees,” said Kermin Martinez-Hernandez, PhD, a CIMER facilitator and an associate professor of chemistry at St. John Fisher University.

Martinez-Hernandez participated in the training when he was a postdoctoral fellow at Wisconsin and has since been a facilitator for more than 10 years. 

He hopes the training will inspire some of the AU attendees to also go down the facilitator route.

“They have an opportunity to practice facilitation. They will model the activity with a group of people so they can actually practice and get feedback about how it went, so they get their feet wet,” he said. “It’s great training, and I’m hoping they find it useful and they start implementing it here in Augusta.”

The Graduate School and workshop attendees plan on developing at least three mentoring programs – one for faculty who work with doctoral students, one for faculty who work with graduate or undergraduate students and one for researchers who work with trainees in labs. 

“This provides an opportunity for our faculty to better understand how to meet their trainees where they are, how to motivate trainees and increase understanding that different people respond to mentorship in different ways,” Sullivan said.

The workshop included respecting social and cultural differences that shape people’s life experiences and how they initiate or respond to mentorship.

“I’ve been training doctoral students since the early 2000s; I can still learn. The student of today and what they’re looking for is very different than the student of 20 years ago,” Sullivan said.

About 32 faculty members who are actively training mentees were invited to participate in the workshop.

Brian Muntean, PhD, an assistant professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology at the Medical College of Georgia at AU, said they covered topics like the importance of having clear goals at the beginning of a mentor-mentee relationship and aligning expectations between both parties so they can successfully reach their goals.

“It’s helpful to reflect on communicating with trainees,” Muntean said. “They might have some challenges that are not apparent. So just having a perspective of all of these things is probably going to be really helpful,” he said.

Sullivan is grateful the university has faculty members who are so dedicated to student success and academic excellence across the board.

“The fact that we have faculty that understands the importance of mentorship and want to ensure they have the ability to give our students their very best, to me, is amazing,” Sullivan said. “I hope that something along the course of the two days resonates with our faculty in a way that says, ‘Oh, wow, I can incorporate that into how I do things, and it’s going to benefit me, it’s going to benefit my students, it’s going to benefit the university.”