Potential Mentoring Activities

To receive the Certificate candidates are required to participate in a one semester long mentorship with a faculty member that is not the candidate's thesis advisor. To arrange a mentorship please contact the Program Director. Here is a list of suggestions for ways that you and your mentor might interact.

I. Shadowing

• Graduate student spends a full day on the cluster campus, following his or her mentor as s/he teaches classes, holds tutorials or advising sessions, has lunch with students or colleagues, attends faculty meetings, or participates in various committee meetings.
• Graduate student spends a week on the cluster campus, shadowing not only his or her mentor, but also other faculty in the department or school in order to have some basis for comparison.
• Graduate student attends lunches arranged by his or her mentor with various institutional administrators; mentor has lunch or dinner with graduate student on Duke's campus, possibly with other Duke faculty.

• How hiring decisions get made at the cluster school: how faculty positions are argued for; how search committees are comprised; what is expected in a letter of interest or an application; what are on-campus interviews like; what are the major mistakes candidates make when they visit; what kinds of talks or teaching presentations are expected?
• Nitty-gritty issues of academic life: how do you manage time for research and family while being responsible for teaching, advising and other service; what is it like to work in an institution where you may be the only faculty member who works on a particular topic or in a particular field; how difficult did the mentor find the transition from life in graduate school to being a faculty member; what resources are available at the school for professional development, conference travel, research funding, etc?
• Pedagogy: choices/challenges of the individual classes that the mentor, the nature of the undergraduate student body, particular instructional goals and problems.
• Faculty governance on the cluster campus: who makes what kinds of decisions; how much autonomy is granted individual faculty members or departments; how much oversight comes from the administration; how much pressure do people feel from external sources, whether parents and boards or state legislatures?
• Department/division issues: what is departmental/divisional life like on the campus?  what is the general atmosphere?  Is it intensively competitive, political, collegial?
• Tenure decisions: what are the procedures and requirements for achieving tenure; what materials need to be gathered; what processes are used in evaluating them; are external assessments required; how are teaching, scholarship and service really weighted; what place do student/course evaluations serve in the process; who finally decides and what is the time clock?
• Professional history of the mentor: the mentor has a professional history of his/her own, and this history may hold important lessons that can only be learned through a kind of personal narrative.

• Graduate student guest lectures in a class of the mentor or helps run a lab.
• Graduate student and mentor share in the design, development and preparation for a class to be offered by the mentor in the spring or next year.
• Graduate student invites the mentor and undergraduate students from the cluster campus to Duke. Mentor visits and comments on one of your own classes; graduate student develops a special research/lab project for the undergraduates using Duke resources; graduate student sets up a visitation day where undergraduates could attend a variety of Duke classes and where the mentor speaks with faculty here.
• Graduate student helps to mentor undergraduates at the cluster campus?