This program aims to provide opportunities for pre-tenure faculty to receive mentoring from senior (post-tenure) faculty and peers. The annual program kicks off at the SMS in Conference at a Saturday workshop.
The format for the mentoring program consists of small groups of 2 senior faculty mentors and 4 pre-tenure faculty. The groups are matched on mutual preferences at the kick-off workshop, and the groups stay intact for a year, connecting on quarterly calls via teleconferencing after the SMS.
We provide sufficient structure for the quarterly calls, but also offer enough flexibility for groups to organize themselves as best serves the group. As part of the knowledge-sharing mission of the program, we solicit check-in reports from each mentoring sub-group in order to aggregate and disseminate best practices and lessons learned with the larger mentoring cohort.
The groups scramble after one year, which allows pre-tenure faculty a wide exposure to different senior faculty and peers. We aim that a new faculty member entering the mentoring program will have, by the end of their 4th year, up to 8 senior mentors and up to 24 peer mentors.
We are currently wrapping the second year of the program and receiving great feedback. Stay tuned for the next year's kick-off. The next program starts in September 2021.
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