Gfriendside889

Involvement of the mentee in the selection of their mentor, the better the outcome of the mentorship. This not only makes for more successful mentorships, it also makes managing a mentoring program simpler. Mentees can simply review mentor applications and discuss their preference with the Regional Membership Director or RVP. We move the world forward by making it better, one person at a time, through coaching and mentoring.Trust, integrity, and respect are very important to us. Our coaches are trained professionals ready to assist you in your growth. Good matching programs are sensitive to demographic variables as well as common professional interests. The assignment of a mentee to a mentor varies greatly across formal mentoring programs. Mentors may review mentee profiles and select their mentees or program administrators may match mentors and mentees. Once you identify a potential Mentor, set up an initial meeting. An open discussion with a potential Mentor is the best way to determine whether you are a good match. Once you have scheduled your meeting, review the following questions and select a few to ask the potential Mentor: General questions yWhat interests you about a mentoring partnership?

• Mentor Matchmaking
• Mentor Matchmaking Reviews Complaints

Abstract

Mentoring serves to guide early stage researchers toward opportunities which can further their careers. The most beneficial mentoring experience occurs when both the mentor and mentee share a common background and have appropriate expectations. Our CTSA serves individuals in a five state region with widely disparate needs and we have often struggled to provide appropriate guidance for those requesting mentoring services. Here we present an overview of our past mentor identification strategy along with a proposed new direction to increase flexibility, sustainability and better serve researchers in our region.

Introduction

Access to mentoring is recognized as an important part of career development.¹, ² Junior medical faculty who were mentored are more likely to have independent funding, able to devote more time to research and have a significantly higher level of career satisfaction than those without mentors.³, ⁴ A primary purpose of this relationship is to facilitate tenure within ones department, which involves little if any interaction with other departments. Traditional mentoring consists of partnering junior faculty with a more senior faculty member within the same department. The recent emphasis on multidisciplinary translational science is a new concept to many academic departments and often requires identification of mentors outside the home department. Even in the traditional mentoring literature, there is a dearth of information on the best approach to form successful mentee‐mentor pairs.⁵ Potential mechanisms for formation of mentor‐mentee pairs include (a) administrative pairing based on arbitrary criteria, (b) administrative pairing based on specified criteria, (c) paired based on mentee selection of mentor.⁶ Here we want to share our experience with our original strategy for identifying mentors for those working in translational science, which was based on administrative pairing with specific criteria, and our evolution to a “self‐help” strategy to facilitate mentee selection of mentor.

The Institute of Translational Health Sciences (ITHS) is a Clinical and Translational Science Award site comprised of three institutions: the University of Washington (UW), Seattle Children's Hospital, and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. The ITHS also serves researchers in the 5‐state WWAMI (Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, Idaho) region. The UW School of Medicine is the sole regional medical school and for over 40 years has developed medical education and patient care collaborations with WWAMI communities. In addition to university‐based researchers, there is increasing interest in community‐based participatory research by American Indian/Alaska Native tribes and primary care practices in the WWAMI region. Thus, there is tremendous diversity, including geographical, scientific, and range of experience, in the pool of researchers seeking mentors.

Initial Mentor Request Experience

One of the core missions of the ITHS is mentoring and career development. The ITHS receives mentoring inquiries from three different sources. The ITHS Research Navigator receives requests primarily via our Web intake form with relatively few phone inquiries. The ITHS Regional Liaison, based in Idaho, serves as a Navigator for WWAMI region investigators and works to meet their mentoring needs. The Regional Liaison initially uses their immediate local network but if a mentoring match is not possible, the Liaison forwards the request to the Navigator. Finally, individual ITHS faculty or ITHS Education Core staff members are contacted directly, often prompted by a particular seminar or educational offering. Figure ​Figure11 shows the regional distribution of 34 mentoring inquiries received by the ITHS between May 2010 and February 2012. This data includes direct requests to the Navigator, referrals from the Regional Liaison to the Navigator and personal interactions with ITHS faculty or staff. As expected, the greatest number of requests came from the UW as it is the largest of the three ITHS partner institutions. Seattle organizations such as Seattle Children's Hospital and Seattle University are included in the Other Seattle category. Requests from WWAMI region investigators comprised almost a quarter of all queries received. It is interesting to note that industry also reached out to the ITHS as a potential source of translational science collaborations. A summary of the reasons mentees initially contacted the ITHS is shown in Table 1. It is common for researchers to request help in multiple areas, hence the total number of requests are greater than the number of people.

Regional distribution of ITHS mentoring requests. Other Seattle includes Seattle Children's and Seattle University. UW = University of Washington; WWAMI = Eastern Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, Idaho.

Table 1

Mentor Matchmaking

Our initial plan for mentoring requests was to match the prospective mentee with ITHS members using our central database (CDB). The ITHS membership form asks applicants to indicate their interest in mentoring as well as their areas of expertise based on NIH‐designated categories. Many, but not all of our members also have multidisciplinary translational research experience. This information resides in the CDB which would then be used to facilitate the matchmaking of mentor and mentee. However, this anticipated data mining immediately became our largest obstacle. The academic categories, which are used by the NIH for reporting purposes, proved too broad to help identify an investigator's specific expertise. For example, a researcher might select Pulmonary Diseases for the category closest to their research. Without further granularity, it is impossible to answer simple questions such as if their research is clinical or basic or whether it involves humans or animals. Our CDB did not have the capability to breakdown these larger groupings into the secondary categorization necessary to appropriately tailor mentor‐mentee pairings. Additionally, the NIH categories were not relevant to our members holding diverse roles such as tribal leader, research coordinator and community volunteer. We also realized that some requests required searches beyond ITHS registered members. Finally, a search for alternate electronic databases within the WWAMI region was unsuccessful. Because of these issues, we found that we could not use the CDB as an automated matchmaking tool.

We then turned to individually pairing mentors and mentees using our personal networks and soon realized the diversity of requests was significantly greater than the Navigator's expertise network. Mentoring requests from the WWAMI region were even more of a challenge for our mentoring team. Regional researchers are often the only person in their field at their academic institution and, if possible, want to be mentored by a colleague geographically close to them to develop relationships and build a translational science team. In several cases, the NIH required researchers to show local mentoring in their grant resubmissions. For these cases the Navigator and the Regional Liaison worked together to determine if there were any matches in a neighboring state to cut down the travel burden. Where appropriate, we paired WWAMI researchers with mentors in Seattle but otherwise relied heavily on the Regional Liaison's network. Successful fulfillment of the diverse mentoring requests often required a multi‐prong approach. This included interrogating NIH RePORTER to identify funded regional investigators, PubMed searches for keywords and affiliations, perusal of research interests on Departmental Websites, and use of personal networks. Each individual request required a significant amount of time and manpower to implement. We concluded that this method was not sustainable in the long‐term to handle the number and complexity of requests, and impeded further expansion of the program.

Our Revised Mentor Identification Plan

Therefore, in order to develop a mentor matchmaking program that was efficient, sustainable and capable of expansion, we opted to develop a system to facilitate mentee identification of mentors. Since the ITHS mentoring team often used public databases such as PubMed, NIH Reporter, and departmental Websites to help fill mentoring requests, we wondered if our mentees were aware of these resources and had used them before contacting the ITHS. We developed a short survey asking for more background regarding their ITHS mentoring request and asked: What was your initial reason for contacting ITHS (Mentor, Grant guidance, Career development, Collaborator, Expertise, Other)? Did you try other methods prior to contact ITHS? If yes, which method(s) (university Websites, Faculty profiles, Local colleagues, ITHS Website, Regional Liaison, Pub Med, Other)? If No, why not (Not aware, no time, other)?

Of the 34 people helped by the Navigator during this time period, eleven (32%) responded to our survey. ITHS contact was the initial (and only) choice of 4 of the 11 respondents. Seven of the eleven survey respondents had unsuccessfully attempted to find mentoring assistance on their own by asking local colleagues, 5 of those also searched faculty research profiles and/or university Websites. Only one person out of 11 indicated that they tried PubMed in their mentor search. None had used other databases such as NIH Reporter due to unawareness of the resources. Although the low response rate limits generalizability, the responses suggest that the majority of mentees use local networks as their initial step, and suggest a lack of familiarity of additional resources.

Therefore, in order to restructure the ITHS mentoring program from our initial labor‐intensive personalized matchmaking service into a “self‐help” model, we focused on providing tools and instructions to empower investigators to take their career into their own hands. Our hypothesis is that providing instruction on a variety of career and mentoring resources will have a greater long‐term impact on the mentees than a single contact with the Navigator. Our new career development Web page is located under the Education and Seminars tab on the ITHS home page. Here we have placed descriptions, tutorials and links to various tools including NIH RePORTER, PubMed, and CTSA Collaboration Opportunities to help mentees identify potential mentors and collaborators. We have also provided links to additional mentoring materials and articles on grantsmanship. The online mentoring tools are augmented by a monthly Career Development Series (CDS) that focuses on practical translational research skills for investigators, including mentorship, grantsmanship and finding collaborators. Based on our survey results, we have added additional seminars on the use of technology to facilitate career development and mentoring. CDS seminars are Webcast live using Adobe Connect and archived in a searchable database for on demand viewing on the ITHS Website. Of course the personal option is still available, as one survey respondent wrote that they “specifically contacted the ITHS to talk to a real person.”

Conclusion

Since the creation of the ITHS, mentoring has been an important part of the Education Core's mission. Our initial efforts at mentor matchmaking were for the most part successful, but required significant time and resources as we were challenged by the broad range of requests that came to us. We developed a more flexible model of mentor identification, one that provides tools and information for the mentee to use. The goal is to provide mentees with the skills to identify mentors and collaborators independently since today's mentee may find themselves a few years down the road being asked to mentor. This model is exportable and applicable across all levels of multidisciplinary research and in any research setting, which is crucial to the diverse group of researchers that the ITHS serves. This mentor matchmaking paradigm should be relevant not just to our members and users but also to other CTSAs and academic institutions. Furthermore, the plan allows us to focus our personal efforts on the subset of mentees that require additional assistance while giving mentees the chance to develop professional skills at their own pace and schedule. We will continue to monitor the progress of this new paradigm by tracking inquiries and anticipate adjusting our content as we collect feedback.

Acknowledgments

This study was supported by NIH UL1RR025014 from the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (BMH, LS, LMS) and NIH K24 HL068796 (LMS).

References

Mentor Matchmaking Reviews Complaints