Why Serve as a Mentor to Undergraduates?
- Serving as a mentor can count towards tenure and promotion decisions.
- Undergraduates can contribute to your broader scholarly interests.
How to Involve Students in Research or Creative Projects
- Academic advising sessions are a good time to suggest that students start to engage in hands-on activities that are relevant to their long term career or educational goals.
- Provide departmental or program descriptions of faculty scholarly interests. Encourage your faculty to add their specialty areas to their UWL profile. It allows students to see what research options are available with different faculty members, along with a picture and contact information.
- Advise students to write for scholarships and grants to pursue their research or creative interests.
- Great sources of potential topics and possible external collaborations can be found at the Community Partnership Portal.
- Send students from one of your courses to the Research and Creativity Symposium with an assignment to increase awareness of research opportunities on campus.
Independent Projects vs. Collaborative Projects
- Students contact may feel more freedom and more ownership over an independent project, however the mentor investing their time runs the risk of the student possibly failing to complete his or her project.
- In collaborative projects, students work on a smaller, more manageable portion of their faculty mentor's project.
Time Management:
- Have students work in teams, which can decrease the number of meetings per week.
- Establish a single meeting time for all students. The students may gain from hearing feedback and discussions of other student's projects.
- Pair up more experienced students with newer students to encourage peer-to-peer training.
- Have students work on a portion of your broader scholarly projects.
Links:
http://www.uwec.edu/ORSP/faculty_staff/Mentor/index.htm
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