Formal Mentorship and Leadership Training Contributes to the Development and Expertise of Graduate Students as Teachers, Scientists, and Engineers
Challenge: High school research pipeline programs heighten the awareness of students to STEM careers. A critical component of these programs is mentorship of these students, often by graduate students. Unfortunately, STEM graduate students are not typically trained in mentorship, limiting their effectiveness in leadership and instruction. This was evident in our high school outreach effort, the Duke Research in Engineering Program (DukeREP), where mentors reported a lack of understanding of mentee expectations/knowledge and a desire to improve their mentor-mentee relationship and teaching capabilities. Novel Initiative: DukeREP PhD student leaders and faculty jointly designed a formal mentorship and leadership course. We generated a concept map to coalesce on four themes that encompass mentorship best practices: Mentoring as teaching, leadership and character, community-building, and fostering wellbeing. Active-learning pedagogy and translational deliverables were implemented into the curriculum, culminating in a mentorship portfolio. Reflection: We successfully trained 15 graduate student mentors with the course. Thematic and phrase frequency analyses on student reflections identified that the course improved the self-efficacy, professional and technical skills, and knowledge of graduate student mentors. This empowered them to cultivate a healthy, student-focused, and collaborative learning environment. Investigating this impact with Likert surveys, DukeREP contributed to the short- and long-term professional and technical development and STEM interests of mentees. Our course’s ability to develop successful mentors emphasizes the need to introduce mentorship and leadership training to all graduate students.
