Formal Programs Promote The Age-Old Custom Of Mentoring

HELP BEGETS HELP: Florida's David Challoner says the memory of an old mentor now inspires his own mentoring efforts. The traditional mentor gets a lot from giving. David Challoner, vice president of health affairs at the University of Florida in Gainesville, remembers a personal mentor like that. Challoner, who studied medicine at Harvard Medical School, then trained in endocrinology under Robert Williams at the University of Washington in Seattle, says Williams would follow the graduates of his programs throughout their careers, continuing to give them advice, information, and job referrals. "He would be on the West Coast and I would be in my little lab on the East Coast, and he would enjoy leaving messages on my machine at 7 a.m.," Challoner recalls with a laugh. "It now stimulates me to look after people and see how I can help them." Such devoted, albeit informal, mentoring goes back centuries and is still around, but in recent years, more formalized programs have become more prevalent. These programs can be long-term or a single interaction, one-to-one or group activities. They often blend social outings with study and can involve contact in person, over the telephone, or via E-mail. Although not yet status quo, mentoring programs are now found at grade school, high school, undergraduate, and postgraduate levels, and even in the workplace. No matter where or what the form, the intention is similar: to go beyond mere instruction by providing young people with role models who offer insight and support on personal, academic, and career issues. ENCOURAGING YOUTH: Recruiting young people to mentoring programs requires sensitivity to their perceptions., ots One to One's Beth Straub, right, with student Kendra Johnson. Challoner recently helped promote such programs as chairman of a group that produced a guidebook for mentors. His group was under the aegis of the prestigious Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy (COSEPUP), which comprises members from the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine. The book, entitled Adviser, Teacher, Role Model, Friend: On Being a Mentor to Students in Science and Engineering (Washington, D.C., National Academy Press, 1997), lists the fundamental practices of a successful mentor, gives examples of good and bad mentoring, and points out the different sorts of guidance needed by young people. One of the book's central recommendations is that universities emphasize the importance of good mentoring by including appraisals of it in faculty evaluations. It says that faculty often go unrecognized for mentoring and can even be penalized for it because it takes time from research. Challoner adds, "Mentoring does not, except in isolated cases, play a specific role in faculty evaluations for promotion, tenure, and salary." Compared with teaching and writing for publication, it is "the least practiced discipline," he believes, even though it is a responsibility for universities at all student levels. His project group found no comparative data on the volume of school-age and university-level mentoring nationally, but he fears that the largest deficit is at the graduate research level. "There are unhappy anecdotes about the inadequate mentoring relationship between research supervisors and the graduate students in their labs," he says. "Graduate students in research universities are the backs upon which the university's research mission is carried out, but that has to be a two-way street. The student has to be seen as more than a performer of research work." The quid pro quo, he says, is for mentors to meet students' needs for study and career preparation. While some mentors have a clear understanding of how to do this, others require instruction, says Challoner. "Every institution is going to have a different spectrum of needs and responsibilities to students, and obviously, each institution can be creative in its own right," he notes. "What counts is the results." The Association for Women in Science (AWIS), a nonprofit society that ranks mentoring among its key activities, stresses that each program should be individually designed to suit to its participants. AWIS executive director Catherine Didion says one reason variety characterizes today's mentoring is that a person is likely to have several mentors over time. "It's a lifelong process, especially when you consider that the average number of job changes a person in the U.S. will have now in a given career is seven," she says. "You need more mentoring, because you make more changes." LEARNING COMMUNITIES: AWIS's Jaleh Daie is enthusiastic about residential learning communities. The first formal AWIS mentoring program, for undergraduate and graduate women in science, ran from 1990-93 and was reestablished in 1995. Throughout that year, community-based mentoring was conducted in 12 urban and rural AWIS chapters nationwide, and the results were chronicled in a special July/August 1997 issue of AWIS Magazine. In an introductory article entitled "Innovations in Mentoring: Residential Learning Communities," University of Wisconsin botany professor and AWIS president Jaleh Daie champions residential learning communities (RLCs) that have sprung up on a number of campuses, including her own in Madison (J. Daie, AWIS Magazine, 26[4]:2, 1997). Undergraduates with similar academic interests live, study, and socialize together in RLCs, alongside graduate students as in-house mentors. "When you have a study group, your pizza and beer buddies become those people," she explains. "If a mentoring program is too structured, it's constrained, but if you have a seamless web of social and academic life, it's a very subtle and effective way to operate." Maria Timmons, immediate past president of the AWIS chapter in Lake Champlain, Vt., coordinates mentoring programs at the University of Vermont in Burlington. She warns that it can be tricky to pair strangers as mentor and prot?g?. Ideally, the two people are of the same gender, but they might have differences in cultural or personal backgrounds. "It needs to be a match of individual personalities, but if it fails, you try to make sure the student comes back to the matching service and tries again," she says. The inauguration last year of annual Presidential Awards for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring indicated the rising official recognition of the importance of this skill. Six institutions and 10 individuals were selected for the first awards, administered by the National Science Foundation on behalf of the White House. Another nine institutions and 10 individuals were named in September as the 1997 honorees. Another indicator is the prevalence nowadays of mentoring on the Internet. One of the largest such programs, started in 1995 by the Palo Alto, Calif.-based Hewlett-Packard Co., has grown to more than 1,600 relationships between HP employees worldwide and students in 246 American schools. Among other such Web sites are the National Research Council's online mentoring center and bulletin board for young scientists and engineers and the American Association for the Advancement of Science's forums, career advice columns, and articles. For middle and high school students, the giant of mentoring is One to One/The National Mentoring Partnership. The Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit organization forges partnerships at the national and local levels with community leaders, schools, businesses, religious congregations, and other organizations to make mentoring a reality for children. Susan Mason, One to One's vice president of communications, identifies two of the most problematic issues for organizations starting a mentoring program: funding people to manage it and connecting with youth as potential protégés. Association for Women in Science 1200 New York Ave., N.W., Suite 650 Washington, D.C. 20005 (800) 886-AWIS or (202) 326-8940 Fax: (202) 326-8960 awis@awis.org Hospital Youth Mentoring Program Deborah Knight-Kerr, Manager Johns Hopkins Hospital 600 N. Wolfe St. Baltimore, Md. 21287-1454 (410) 955-1488 Fax: (410) 955-9803 One to One/The National Mentoring Partnership 2801 M St., N.W. Washington, D.C. 20007 (202) 338-3844 Fax: (202) 338-1642 nmp@mentoring.org The book Adviser, Teacher, Role Model, Friend: On Being a Mentor to Students in Science and Engineering, is available from National Academy Press on the Internet at http://www.nap.edu/readingroom/books/mentor. Funded by public giving campaigns and larger corporate and foundation contributions, One to One has offices in 13 other cities around the nation. In its first five years, the program has matched 25,000 students with mentors, and it intends to achieve 2 million mentoring matches by the year 2000. Recruiting young people requires sensitivity, according to Beth Straub, assistant director of the Greater Boston One to One. She cites one of her programs, matching sixth- and seventh-grade students at Woodrow Wilson Middle School in Dorchester, Mass., with employees of the nearby Carney Hospital. Carney is among three hospitals in the Boston region that participate in One to One programs (Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital are the others). The goal is to introduce students to health-care careers through interaction with professionals. "The Wilson school is just up the road from Carney, and when we asked the kids their impressions of the hospital, they said, 'When you go in there, you don't come out,'" Straub recalls. "So this program was a first step in for them." In New York, 14 hospitals participate in One to One projects. Two-Beth Israel Medical Center and Mount Sinai Medical Center-also are part of a separate project, the Hospital Youth Mentoring Program, which is funded by the Commonwealth Fund and administered by Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Operating since June 1993, this program is sponsored by 15 hospitals in 10 states and Washington, D.C. Each hospital foots most of an annual program bill ranging from $75,000 to more than $200,000. The program matches at-risk youth from low-income families with mentors to help them to complete high school and make the transition to college or work. INFORMAL AND FUN: Students and mentors, including, from left, Rebecca Amaru, Maria Perez, Charity Banfield, Latoya Lewis, and Susan T. Cohen attended the Mount Sinai Scholar's Program's annual Mentor-Mentee Picnic. Mount Sinai is the only participant in the Hospital Youth Mentoring Program to use medical students as mentors, and they are eager. "This year, it's a great class; everybody wants to be a mentor. We may have to turn some people away," says assistant coordinator Maria Perez. "They find it awfully rewarding, and both sides learn from the friendship they develop." About 50 students from the Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics High School are paired annually with a first-year or second-year medical student, although doctors and other Mount Sinai staff also may participate. In the final two years of the three-year program, the same student and mentor usually stay together, speaking on the telephone at least once weekly and meeting twice monthly, although Perez says the time spent together often grows as the relationship develops. Mount Sinai gives youths in the program a summer internship at the hospital. A benchmark in 1997 was the first acceptance to medical school at Mount Sinai of a mentorship program alumnus, Hector Vasquez of East Harlem. "We call him our poster boy," Perez jokes. SEVERAL MENTORS: Variety characterizes today's mentoring, according to Catherine Didion of AWIS. PERSONAL SKILLS: Mentorship, like project management, requires technical knowledge and interpersonal skills, counsels Abbott's Jennifer Ackerman. Formal mentoring also is making its mark on private enterprise. AWIS is working with several companies, particularly R&D divisions, Didion reports. "More and more companies, I think, are now trying to have some program of pairing junior and senior scientists," she says. Researchers in such companies often are isolated, with relatively little interaction among the general public or peers, and attrition is therefore a problem, according to Didion. "Career tools" are needed to help the employee progress through the company. Other reasons she cites for the increasing importance of workplace mentoring are a contemporary emphasis on interdisciplinary skills in science, including skills that do not require scientific training, and competitive pressures in some fields to shorten the period between development and marketing of products. One company in the vanguard of science mentoring is Merck & Co. Inc. of Whitehouse Station, N.J. It ran two nine-month mentoring pilots that finished at the end of 1996 and last June, respectively. Each had 40 volunteer participants in a roughly 1:2 mentor/protégé ratio, and one of the programs involved a large contingent of scientists. Inspired by positive comments from both mentors and prot?g?s, Merck is now developing two more 12-month volunteer programs, each with 25 mentors and 25 protégés. Mickey Peterson, director of work/life balance, says formal mentoring will aid interdisciplinary teamwork. "One of the things going on at Merck is the philosophy of worldwide business teams," she reveals. Researchers are included in these teams, which help to develop marketing strategies worldwide. Another pilot is being devised by TAP Pharmaceuticals Inc., a Deerfield, Ill.-based joint venture between Takeda Chemical Industries Ltd., a Japanese company, and Abbott Laboratories of Abbott Park, Ill. A committee member for the new program is Jennifer Ackerman, senior R&D operations manager. She says project management is an area that relies heavily on mentorship, especially for women. "There's a stereotype that a woman who is forceful is not a soft, gentle, warm, caring person, and sometimes I think that's uncomfortable for folks, for both men and women." She cites a male boss as a personal mentor who "has really moderated my style a lot over the years." Four of the five project managers who report to her are women, and each is responsible for facilitating new drug-development programs but does not have direct-line supervision over the R&D teams. In defining project management, Ackerman could be defining mentorship: "It's directing a team without making it seem like directing. To my mind, it's an area of 40 percent technical knowledge and 60 percent personality and personal skills."

Formal Programs Promote The Age-Old Custom Of Mentoring

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