Mentoring for Life: Enhancing STEM Graduate Student Well-Being

STEM disciplines have a retention issue, especially for underrepresented graduate students. Although students leave for many reasons, one underlying cause is a lack of attention to mentoring and students’ well-being. Students who do not feel as if they belong are more likely to leave as are students who are unable to develop a trusting, supportive relationship with faculty. The loss of these graduate students represents a potential loss to future scientific capacity.

Eastern Michigan University is piloting a Mentoring Certificate program designed to expose STEM graduate students to evidence-based practices in mentoring and well-being. This work is grounded in models of graduate student socialization and socio-cognitive career theory, designed to address the multiple underlying causes of declining well-being, and simultaneously train graduate students to be effective mentors.

The training of graduate students to mentor effectively will ensure sustainability as these students become faculty, supervisors, and mentors themselves.

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Learn more at EMU Today

McCallum summed up the project with the following points:

• Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines have a retention issue, especially for underrepresented graduate students. Although students leave school for many reasons, one underlying and well documented cause is a lack of attention to mentoring and students’ well-being.
• Students who do not feel as if they belong are more likely to leave, as are students who are unable to develop a trusting, supportive relationship with faculty.
• The loss of these graduate students greatly impacts society, as these are often individuals who have the capacity to solve many of the World’s central problems.
• The project will pilot, test, and validate mentoring interventions and simultaneously teach graduate students to be effective mentors.