Faculty Mentoring Program

As a community, we want to help our colleagues achieve career milestones, such as tenure or promotion. We also want them to feel supported and to be happy! Mentors can provide career, research, teaching, and personal advice. UMSI maintains mentoring programs for faculty members who are part of the regular instructional staff. To offer the best chance of success, UMSI offers three kinds of mentoring support: primary; group; and peer.

The UMSI Mentorship Program

The UMSI Faculty Mentorship Program Description and Expectations has excellent information about the mentoring program and whom the Associate Dean for Faculty assigns to receive a primary mentor.

Primary Mentoring: Assistant, Associate, Research and Clinical, (some ranks) Lecturers

Primary mentoring refers to a specific senior faculty member appointed to provide guidance to a specific more junior faculty member. Associates are assigned a mentor who is a senior faculty member in UMSI. If there is no obvious mentor within UMSI, the Associate Dean for Faculty will assist associate professors in recruiting an outside mentor of their choice.

With respect to the primary mentorship relationships, the above linked to faculty mentorship program description does a good job of describing the expectations that mentees and mentors can have for each other.

There are also a number of good resources for both mentors and mentee developed by UM and beyond

1st Year Tenure Track Assistant Professors being with a Launch Committee

UMSI participates in the UM Launch Committee Program sponsored by Advance (http://advance.umich.edu). The ADVANCE Program promotes faculty diversity in all fields and aims to support university faculty in recruitment, retention, climate, and leadership. Launch committees provide support and guidance to new junior faculty (assistant professor track) as they begin their careers at Michigan and strive to with the new faculty member from the time of hire until the end of the first year at Michigan. The Launch Committee focuses on areas that are essential for a new hire to be successful and consists of the following five members (a senior faculty member in the department who is also the new assistant professor's mentee, the Associate Dean for Faculty, a senior faculty member from outside the department, and ADVANCE faculty member and the mentee). In years 2-6 Tenure Track Assistant Professors participate in the primary mentoring described above.

Group Mentoring: Assistant, Associate, Research and Clinical, (some ranks) Lecturers

Group mentorship refers to advice offered in a class or collective setting. A number of optional mentoring sessions are held for instructional faculty throughout the academic year. These are typically optional monthly peer mentoring lunches . The agenda is driven by the faculty who participate. Thus, Assistant Professors might have different topics from those selected by Associate Professors or Lecturers. In the past, faculty have done a mix of peer mentoring/talking among themselves, inviting senior faculty or UMSI staff to join them for a discussion, or seeking out experts in some topic from elsewhere around UM. There is funding to support programming.

Group Mentoring: Early Career Proposal Program

Every year the Office of Research offers a program for early-career faculty to assist with the preparation of a competitive proposal. This program utilizes small groups for feedback and accountability as well as large-group information sessions. All junior faculty are invited to attend, even those who may not be planning to submit in the current year, recognizing this process is beneficial for all early career researchers. By participating in this program, assistant professors are committing to prepare their research ideas and thinking about their research trajectory, without necessarily tailoring to any specific solicitation or funder.

Peer Mentoring:

Peer mentoring is learning among faculty members initiated and led by members of the group. Past examples at UMSI have included writing groups and journal clubs. Announcements about those are more decentralized, but typically get announced throughout the first semester of a term.