Mentoring Fellows work to improve mentorship in Purdue Engineering
The Graduate School’s Mentoring Fellows Program was established in 2022 as part of a three-year initiative to improve mentoring at Purdue University.
Last spring, the College of Engineering’s three graduate students and two faculty mentors identified different aspects of the advisor-student mentoring relationship that needed to be evaluated, improved or highlighted.
Over the summer, they worked to implement a new College-wide Individual Development Plan (IDP), created a survey to better understand faculty perspectives on mentoring and developed a series of workshops for the Fall 2022 semester. This fall, they promoted the new IDP with faculty members and students, distributed and evaluated the survey with faculty members and ran a series of four mentoring workshops.
There will be an effort in 2023 to continue the momentum of this impressive group with another set of workshops in the Spring 2023 semester in addition to evaluating other mentoring needs in the College of Engineering.
The Mentoring Fellows for 2022 are graduate students Emily Garcia (industrial engineering), Rachel Gehr (environmental and ecological engineering), Suzanne Swaine (aeronautics and astronautics) and faculty Christopher Brinton (electrical and computer engineering) and Joseph Rispoli (biomedical engineering).
The three graduate students and two faculty members selected this year have shown a strong commitment to improving mentoring relationships, and the College of Engineering has benefited tremendously from their work.
