This site, hosted by the UF Counseling and Wellness Center, includes resources for learning about diversity and how to be “an active advocate and leader for social change”. Learn about multicultural competencies and improve your skills for being a better ally and mentor to all!
The Science of Mentorship
The National Academies has published a report on the science of mentorship, and it is freely available online! While “report” sounds quite technical, this is actually a book whose chapters focus on subjects that include what mentorship is, why identity matters in the STEMM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine) fields, the forms mentorship can take, and what can be measured in mentoring relationships. There is a lot of helpful information here, and much of it is data-driven. You need to make a free account on the National Academies Press website to download the free PDF, but it’s worth it!
Tips for Finding a Mentor, from NPR
NPR published this nice piece last week on how to find a mentor and what to do once you’ve found one. It’s not specifically focused on the sciences, but it has a lot of great ideas and suggestions about what to look for in a mentor, how to ask someone to be your mentor, and how to get the most out of the relationship.
Read: How to find a mentor and make it work
Learn how to recognize students in distress
Kognito is a free, online simulation that will teach you techniques to recognize and help students in distress. Trainings include a general introduction to learning the signs of psychological distress, and specific modules focused on assisting student veterans and LGBTQ+ students who may be facing discrimination.
Creating an Individual Development Plan
An Individual Development Plan, or IDP, is a personalized, structured document that assists with goal setting and facilitating communication between mentors and mentees.
Graduate students in the UC Davis Graduate Group in Plant Biology have developed extremely helpful materials for learning about and producing an IDP, and these are available on the Plantae portal.
Read: Hope is Not a Stragegy – Designing an IDP for a graduate program
Watch: All Aboard the Mentor-ship – Making and Using an Individual Development Plan
Biology Mentorship Committee personal recommendation from Emily Sessa:
I watched this webinar and found it extremely useful; I had never heard of an IDP before, but this kind of document appeals to my desire for organization, and I could see it being really useful for students.
CLAS New Faculty Guide
This guide for new UF faculty contains information on everything from hiring paperwork to housing, parking, preparing to teach, and what to expect in your first few weeks and months at the university.
Best Practices for Mentoring Junior Faculty
This document was created by the CLAS Faculty Council at UF, to address the need for improved resources for mentoring junior faculty in CLAS and at UF broadly. It contains not only the Council’s recommendations at the institutional and department levels, but also some links to mentoring resources already available at UF.