SMTA Announces New Partnership with MentorNet
Get the Benefit of Additional Mentoring!
As an engineering or science graduate student, postdoc, or early career (untenured) faculty member, you may already have a primary mentor. But as you advance your career, have you considered the benefits of having an additional mentor?
The SMTA recently partnered with MentorNet to in response to a growing demand for mentorship opportunities for student members. The partnership allows members of the SMTA privileges to resources offered by MentorNet such as its one-on-one program, easy matching to SMTA members, and the résumé database for students.
How do you sign up?
Go to www.MentorNet.net and follow this 2-step process:
1) Join the Community: Click on “Join” and register.
2) Create a One-on-One Program profile: Sign in to the community and follow the One-on-One Mentoring Program links to create a protege or mentor profile.
The MentorNet E-Mentoring Program is designed to provide information, encouragement, and support to community college, undergraduate, and graduate students, postdocs, and untenured faculty. Protégés are matched in one-on-one e-mentoring relationships with mentors who have work experience, and MentorNet provides the training, coaching and support for them to pursue an 8-month mentoring relationship.
Here is an opportunity to get additional information, encouragement, advice, and access to networks from a faculty member in your field and, if you choose, from outside your current institution. You can search for and choose the mentor that best suits your needs and have a chance to discuss topics such as faculty jobs, networking, work/life balance, research issues, grant writing and tenure.
MATCHING: Once a protege creates a protege profile, she/he is presented with the profiles (minus identifying information) of up to 5 potential mentors. The protege then can choose one of these mentors or ask MentorNet to make the match automatically for her/him. If after two weeks, the protege has not chosen or asked MentorNet to choose, we will attempt to automatically match her/him with a mentor.
The mentor and protege both express preferences on their profiles for the characteristics of their partner (school attended, educational level, gender and more). The matching program takes into account each person's preferences when assessing and making matches.
SUPPORT: As a structured e-mentoring program, we provide program support to mentors and proteges to help them make the most of their experience. We have posted a training guide on our web site and have developed web-based interactive training tutorials that take mentors through some common mentoring situations.
In addition, after they are matched, mentors and proteges will receive coaching in the form of weekly or biweekly (depending on their educational level) email discussion suggestions for the entire 8 months of their official MentorNet relationship. These messages will contain suggestions that address initiating and sustaining a successful e-mentoring relationship.
Since 1998, MentorNet has matched more than 21,000 pairs of proteges and mentors with strong results. We hope you’ll be one of them!
For more information, visit www.MentorNet.net, or contact Karen at 952-920-7682, karen@smta.org.
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