Last week I participated in a mentoring briefing session for
our Early Career Academics’ Mentoring Scheme, which we run
cross-institutionally with the University of Dundee.
This year our mentor pool has been under pressure from REF,
retirements and relocations – resulting in a reduction in the number of
available mentors. As the number of researchers looking for mentors has
remained at around the same level as last year, this leaves us struggling to
make suitable matches and the 2012-13 cycle is therefore getting off to a slow
start.
Once of the effects of this is that our scheduled briefing
sessions have had much smaller numbers of participants than in the past. The
session I attended last week, for example had just 5 participants, compared to
the 15 or so attending each of our sessions last year.
Nevertheless it was a great session. As is usual with these
sessions, we had invited existing mentors and mentees along to talk about their
experience with mentoring, address any concerns and answer any questions from
the new participants joining the scheme.
On this occasion we had two mentors attending. On the face
of it they had a lot in common, both being from the same institution and the
same school. However, everything else about their respective mentoring
experiences was different.
One of the pair, Linda, had quite a formal arrangement with
her mentor. Meetings were planned and scheduled in advance. They always took
place in her mentor’s office. They ran strictly to time. An agenda was agreed
in advance of each meeting, and a set of summary notes exchanged afterwards.
Very organised. And very successful. Outcomes included collaborative working,
grant funding and joint supervision of PhD students.
The other mentee, Oliver, approached things with his mentor differently.
Meetings were set up when Oliver felt he needed one. They always met in a café.
No agenda was agreed and Oliver decided what he wanted to discuss and announced
this at the start of each meeting. No notes or minutes were made. Very informal.
Also, very successful.
Both of them were so pleased with the experience that when
we asked for volunteers to talk at the briefing session they both said they
felt it was something they must do, and they really communicated their
enthusiasm for the scheme.
The theme of mentoring being a flexible and adaptive
relationship, based around the needs of the mentee was reinforced by the mentor
in attendance – a very senior academic
and an experienced mentor. He talked about the half-dozen or so mentees he had
supported, and how each one of them was different in terms of their objectives,
the kind of support they were looking for and the nature of the mentoring
relationship that developed.
Although successful mentoring does respect some fundamental
features, mentoring is not a prescriptive process based on a set of rigid
principles, and the experiences expressed at the briefing session last week was
a powerful demonstration of how varied different
mentoring partnerships can be and yet how well mentoring can work.
