Page 23 - UD Research Magazine Vol5-No2

Mentoring takes many different forms, and mentors appear in many different guises. At its most basic, it seems to me, good, informal faculty mentoring involves some of these elements: providing helpful (and wanted) advice or encouragement, offering guidance, taking an interest, smoothing a path, expressing empathy, sharing information so that everyone is on the same page when it comes to proce- dures and policies, offering to look over a colleague’s grant proposal or tenure file, and keeping everyone “in the loop” so that no one feels excluded. Formal mentoring programs, in which a new faculty member is paired with a mentor and the two meet regularly for career-oriented conversations,
can increase the success (and reten- tion) of talented faculty members. I am particularly taken with the
possibilities for using social media for mentoring, especially when one is the “solo” woman or woman of color in a department, grappling with gender and/ or racial assumptions or stereotypes. Social media-based mentoring expands the range of available mentors and helps break down feelings of isolation.
Good mentoring is crucial to the career of any academic, but especially for those who don’t arrive at an academic post knowing exactly
how to get from “newbie” to
full professor in 12 easy steps.
first person
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Anne M. Boylan, professor of history and of women and gender studies, conducts research in American history with an emphasis on women and their rights. She has written several books, including her most recent work—Women’s Rights in the United States: A History in Documents (Oxford University Press, 2015). She received the inaugural Torch Award for Women’s Equality from the UD Women’s Caucus in 2012.
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