Mentoring engineering students: Turning pebbles into diamonds

Journal of Engineering Education, Jul 2001 by Vesilind, P Aarne

2. The university must be the organizer for improving advising. Training programs for advisors can not be established and maintained on a departmental basis.

3. The university should provide rewards and appropriately recognize faculty participation in an advisor training program.

4. Members of the dean's office must develop regular feedback sessions with students. At the University of Michigan, for example, each department is regularly evaluated and the process always begins by asking the students for their opinions on what is happening in the department.

5. The university should create awards for exemplary mentoring. At Wayne State University, an award was inaugurated for the Outstanding Graduate Mentor, patterned after one at Arizona State University. The Wayne State award requires a nominating letter from the departmental chair, a statement from the nominee accepting the nomination and stating his or her philosophy on mentoring, and at least three letters from present or past graduate students. The first year the competition was held, over fifty-two nominations were received! And although only three letters of support were required, two of the nominees received letters from over fifty past and present students! The university publishes and distributes to all faculty and graduate students the winner's nominating letter and the statement by the nominee, as well as excerpts from the supporting letters.

6. Quality advising should become part of the tenure and promotion process. At the present time the tenure dossier might contain undergraduate student evaluations but there is no further input from the students. Letters should be solicited from former students asking their opinions on mentoring and these letters should be included as part of the dossier.

7. All students should be asked to complete exit surveys, asking them to assess the experience they have had with their advisor and other faculty in their department.

These are all good ideas and if implemented can no doubt improve the advising process at any university. But we have to be realistic. If a faculty member, especially a senior faculty member, does not wish to spend time helping students, then there is little a university can do to improve the situation. Mentoring does not come from a guidebook, a set of rules, or even incentives. Mentoring comes from the heart. Ya gotta love it. It's kinda like the old saying: "Never try to teach a pig to sing. It won't work and it annoys the pig."

VI. CONCLUSION

When does mentoring cease? Do the proteges, upon graduation, break the umbilical chord and trundle off on their own? I suggest that this actually never happens. A mentor is like a tattoo. A mentor is with you forever. Whatever becomes of you professionally, you will always be known as "so-and-so's student."

As proof, I offer the difficulty former graduate students have in calling their mentors by their first name. It took me ten years after graduation before I could muster up the courage to call my mentor, Dr. Daniel Okun, former chair of the Department of Environmental Sciences and Engineering, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill by his first name. Why not, I kept telling myself? I was a professor just like he was, and he probably would have liked the more familiar salutation. But there was something that prevented the conversion to the familiar. He is a special person. Always will be. He is my mentor.