Mentoring of Junior Facult y

1. Mentoring of Junior Faculty Some thoughts from the Faculty in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering University of Wisconsin-Madison

2. Outline • Context culture/environment mentee responsibilities process and feedback • Scenarios unbalanced skill deficiencies ethics others? • Pitfalls

3. Assumptions • Mentoring extends beyond the promotion and tenure decision. • Institutional culture, values, and expectations vary in terms emphasis placed on teaching, scholarship, and service/outreach. • There is no “one size” fits all.

4. Goals of Faculty Mentoring • Provide advice and counsel on being a successful member of the faculty on a regular basis. • Help mentee assimilate into faculty culture. • Promote knowledge base of methods for teaching and research that have track records of success and failure. • Facilitate skills for managing competing priorities, research and teaching staff (students and post docs), service, and fiscal planning. • Facilitate understanding of institutional operations from a faculty perspective.

5. Teaching and Research Methods • Should not dictate or even encourage methods used in teaching or research by junior faculty. • Accelerate growth and steer junior faculty from continually “re-inventing the wheel.” • Share lessons learned on successes and failures in teaching and research methods. • Share best practices gained from experience. • Be knowledgeable of university and discipline resources that junior faculty have available to develop research and teaching skills. • Monitor teaching and research effectiveness regularly, and take action/provide assistance early if needed.

6. Facilitate Management Skills • Success requires effective management of • Graduate students, teaching assistants, and staff • Competing priorities • Grant budgets • Project management and delivery • Most junior faculty have limited or non-existing experience with managing students/staff, competing priorities, and budgets. • Be knowledgeable of university and discipline resources available for developing management skills.

7. Assimilation into Faculty Culture - 1 • Tendency to limit committee participation and service of junior faculty to allow them to focus on research and teaching. • Guide junior faculty to participate in committees that preserve their time while giving them access to senior colleagues in dept.

8. Assimilation into Faculty Culture - 2 • Provide junior faculty participation in committees to accelerate integration into department without overloading with service and committee work. • Committee chair needs to recognize need to engage but not overload junior faculty. • Mentor committees should monitor engagement and service workload of junior faculty.

9. Operations of Faculty • Institutional change driven by “programming” junior faculty to operate differently than existing senior faculty is a double edge sword • Senior faculty may not be willing or capable of taking on new administrative tools or expectations • Partially due to ability and desire • Partially due to managing priorities and time • Junior faculty may not be in a position to say “no” to unreasonable administrative expectations • Need senior faculty to participate in training junior faculty on administrative activities to find a balance of work load for faculty and staff.

10. Keys to Success - 1 • Mentor committees should be formed early and should be diverse in discipline, age, and if possible, input from the candidate on membership. • Mentor committees should meet regularly (quarterly). • Inform mentor meetings and mentors should be encouraged. • Committee chair & members must understand role and responsibility in success, be committed, and be available to assist.

11. Keys to Success -2 • Membership must be knowledgeable about resources available to help junior faculty be successful. • Must encourage faculty member to become engaged in academic unit (not isolated). • Taking action early and deliberately when problems become evident. Level of action varies depending on issue and timeline.

12. Potential Pitfalls -1 • Waiting too long to start mentoring (aka…year before tenure decision!). • Lack of engagement during mentoring period (one 1-hr meeting per year is not enough). • Committee too narrow in composition i.e., discipline, etc.

13. Potential Pitfalls -2 • Committee populated by inexperienced or reluctant members, lack of participation by dept leaders, or lack of continuity in membership. • Inaction, when data/behavior suggest problems exist. • Inability to see problems beyond obvious ones. • Failing to provide formal documentation of the mentoring process (junior faculty need more than talk…a letter summarizing strengths/weaknesses and praise/suggestions is important).

14. Acknowledgements • We would like to thank the colleagues from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UW-Madison for their input on this presentation.