Skills and Topics

Mentoring Skills & Topics

Through the Interdisciplinary Networking Committee, ADVANCE aims to provide each faculty member a network of mentors with a range of expertise and perspectives on the institution as well as on specific career development domains. As referenced within Let's Rethink Mentoring, you may find a need for mentorship in some or all of the following domains:

Professional Development
Emotional Support --Imposter Syndrome: What is it? How to over come it?

A Sense of Community
Accountability
Institutional Sponsorship
Access to Networks
Project Specific Feedback

Resources and periodic discussion opportunities will be provided through Lehigh ADVANCE and the Provost's Office on the topics below to supplement the faculty mentoring experience. This list focuses on issues identified by Lehigh STEM women faculty to support successful faculty careers. They are listed to bring to the front of mind the types of things you may wish to discuss with some or all of your formal and informal mentors.

Topics:
Being a Good Mentor
Your Mentor Network Map (adapted from WEBS 2011 Workshop materials)
Ideas for Mentoring Activities
Time management
Career Mapping

Tracking Success/Failure- visuals
Ethics in a research laboratory
Mentoring Graduate Students
Teaching
Balancing it all: Teaching, Service, Scholarship
Cultivating Networks and Collaboration
Dealing with Difficult People
Managing a team (research group)
Grant Writing
Effective Meetings
Promotion and Tenure
Honing Leadership Skills
Becoming a Visible Leader
Leading a team (collaboration
Learning the Institution

Negotiating

Every Semester Needs a Plan: Related to time management, this link provides resources for goal and project management for the things that matter most, but tend to have low built-in accountability. 

Understand Unconscious Bias
In addition to being a successful researcher and teacher, a good mentor is accessible, responsive, open-minded, dedicated to the development of others, self-confident and people-oriented. Mentors should also be educated about unconscious biases, cognitive errors, and stereotype-threats that junior faculty, especially women or underrepresented minorities, may encounter. Use these references and tools to enhance mentoring:

-Stereotype Threat: Research-based suggestions for reducing the negative consequences of stereotyping on performance.
- Project Implicit, the Harvard site where you can take the Implicit Association Tests. There is also a Project Implicit information site
-Rising Above Cognitive Errors, JoAnn Moody
-Cognitive Errors and Unintended Biases: A Very Quick Review JoAnne Moody
Additional information about can be found by the link in the main menu of ADVANCE.