Academic Affairs New Faculty Notes - Message #2

New faculty can benefit greatly from mentoring relationships. To name just a few, research shows that mentored faculty have an easier time adapting to organizational culture, increased career satisfaction, and greater probability of long-term success. The Office of Academic Affairs is committed to offering mentoring opportunities as one way of supporting new faculty. Through the IUPUI Mentoring Academy, the Office of Academic Affairs supports the creation of mentoring programs within academic units. If your school has an existing program, you may have already been assigned a mentor or could request to become part of the program.

However, all is not lost if your school doesn’t have a formal mentoring program! You can seek out a mentor that will help you meet your professional development needs. The first step in preparing for mentoring is to determine what those needs are. Beginning an individual development plan is a structured way to perform such a self-assessment, but the basic framework is to identify your short-, medium-, and long-term goals and then think about the skills and support you need to achieve those goals. With that information in hand, you can set out to find the mentor (or group of mentors) that can assist you in obtaining the skills you need to achieve your goals.

To learn more about mentoring, attend the IUPUI Mentoring Symposium on Tuesday, November 27. More information and registration is available here.

New faculty are busy, but few things are as motivating as collaborating with graduate and professional students on campus. IUPUI offers resources to help faculty develop the skills to mentor more productively.

The IUPUI Graduate Office sponsors the Graduate Mentoring Center providing mentoring dialogues for faculty to connect, discuss best practices, and share tools from the National Research Mentoring Network. Faculty sessions are facilitated by Randall Roper (Center Director, Associate Professor, Biology) and Etta Ward (AVC for Research Development). Monthly midday mentoring sessions are available for students along with a summer workshop series. The Center for Teaching and Learning and the Graduate Office also provide access to the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning, a network supporting faculty and graduate students with webcasts and workshops on mentoring, inclusive classrooms, and teaching as research. The Graduate Office also offers multiple workshops to help faculty guide students to degree completion.  

“Find a list-keeping technology and use it to organize your life and alleviate the need for hunting for notes! My personal favorite is OneNote, which is free and available through IUware’s Microsoft Office tools. With a bit of forethought, it can be organized to keep track of research projects, courses, committees–anything you need to do at work or at home. You can keep various “to-do” lists….stuff to read, stuff to do, people to connect with–and even upload attachments, photographs, or websites to your lists. What I love most is that I can sync it across my computers at work, at home, and my phone–giving me ready access to anything I need at any time of day. I try to scan the few handwritten notes I keep in order to integrate them with OneNote and cut down on clutter, while saving trees.”

- Kathy Johnson, Professor of Psychology and Executive Vice Chancellor of IUPUI

• Tuesday, November 13: Reading at the Table by Rebecca Shrum
• Tuesday, November 27: Mentoring Symposium