Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate mentors' and mentees' perspectives of the mentor role within an education doctoral mentoring program at a mid-sized public institution Design/methodology/approach: Data from individual interviews with mentors and mentees were collected as part of a larger case study of a doctoral mentoring program Mentees were doctor of education (EdD) students in their first and second years of the program Mentors were identified as individuals who graduated from or are further along in the doctoral program Five (N = 5) mentees and seven (N = 7) mentors participated in interviews, which were then transcribed and coded to identify emergent themes, along with transcripts of presentations given by the mentors Findings: Four themes emerged within the data: differentiating support roles, mentoring as a way to identify gaps in doctoral student needs, mentoring as support for doctoral student success and ways to provide suggestions for mentoring program improvement Results indicated that mentors and mentees viewed the mentor role as being unique from the roles of faculty advisor and dissertation chair Mentors and mentees alike responded positively to virtual mentoring Research limitations/implications: Participation by mentors and mentees was limited to first- and second-year doctoral students;thus, dissertation-stage students' perceptions of mentoring could not be determined Implications include the value of mentoring in filling the gaps of support for doctoral students and the capability of mentoring programs to be adapted to unexpected circumstances such as the COVID-19 pandemic Originality/value: This study targets scholar-practitioner students in an EdD program, who are often overlooked by mentoring literature, and distinguishes research between faculty mentoring and mentoring performed by other students/recent graduates Additionally, the pandemic gave the authors an opportunity to explore adapting mentoring to virtual formats © 2021, Emerald Publishing Limited

Filling the gaps: how the non-faculty mentor role contributes to the doctoral program support structure

Alumni mentoring in social work allows students to connect with experienced practitioners in a nonevaluative context and for alumni to strengthen university connections. This study describes and ev...

Formalizing Alumni Mentoring in Social Work Education: Lessons Learned From a Three-Year Program Evaluation

This paper aims to provide students with a career edge, business students require more than concepts and calculations to be successful in their future career. They require professional skill sets, mentors, relationship guides and as much real industry experience as they can gather before graduation. This study sheds some light on how a small business school (SBS) in a nonprofit private academic institution (NPAI) located in an isolated rural area of the USA has been able to tap its strong alumni relationships to provide mentoring and experiential learning opportunities to students using its student-managed investment funds (SMIFs) as the vehicle. Although this study uses a small, geographically isolated institution, the authors believe that the approach taken by this particular school can be replicated by any academic institution that strives to enhance student learning experience by promoting mentorship and experiential learning.,This study starts with a brief introduction (Section 1) and a short review of literature (Section 2) to highlight the numerous benefits of alumni engagement and student mentorship. Section 2 shows institutional background on the NPAI, the SBS and the SMIF. The major part of the study starts with a discussion on the set of rules to guide in the construction of a student-alumni relationship framework that could be easily modified to the unique characteristics of the institution. Next, the role and responsibility of the investment advisory board (IAB) and its members’ engagement with students are discussed. In the last part of the study, SBS is used as a case study to show how alumni contribute to SBS and enhance students’ experiential learning by contributing as mentor, IAB member, advisors to the FMIF and career mentorship. This study concludes with a discussion on potential areas of conflict and friction for alumni involvement.,This study shows that SBS in a NPAI has been able to tap its strong alumni relationship to provide mentoring and experiential learning opportunities to students using its SMIF as the vehicle. The authors believe that the approach taken by this particular school can be replicated by any academic institution that strives to promote mentorship and experiential learning.,This case study is focused on a SBS in a NPAI that has a strong alumni relationship and enough resources to successfully tap on its alumni. It would be interesting to learn how this approach can be used in resource-limited public institutions.,As the case study shows, any business school that values experiential learning can rely on its alumni to enhance student learning experience by properly using its alumni resources.,The results of this study show that business schools’ outreach opportunities and student experiential learning experience can be enhanced and business schools’ academic qualification and ranking, which leads to improvement in student enrollment, can be improved. Overall, the major beneficiary would be the business schools’ immediate and larger community.,The authors are positive that multiple universities are properly taking advantage of using their alumni relationship.

Value Add: A Finance Case Study on How to Enhance Student Learning Experience through Student Managed Investment Fund and Engaged Alumni Network.

The extensive body of literature on mentoring has largely ignored the developmental needs of mentors themselves. This conceptual and practice-oriented paper asks mentors and others to consider the needs of mentors who may or may not arrive ready to deal with the challenges of being effective mentors. The authors ask: how should mentors think about their own growth and development? Drawing on a broad spectrum of academic literatures, three frames are proposed for guiding mentors' thinking about themselves and four practices to spur their continuous improvement. The three frames are a simultaneous dual focus on people and tasks as mentors exercise leadership; an inclusive mind-set that works across the multidimensionality of identities in others and themselves; and a keen sense of the threats and rewards of managing the perceptions of others. We recommend the use of four practices for self-examination: engage in structured self-reflection; participate in standardized assessments to see others and one's self differently; build peer support among colleagues; and ask for feedback in concrete terms. We conclude by offering the benefits and challenges as mentors engage in the difficult work of acquiring in-depth self-awareness.

A Model for Strengthening Mentors: Frames and Practices.

Career Centre has a main role as a division in Vocational Secondary School (VSS) to bridge the students and alumni with their work field. Finding out how the success of the Career Centre's performance is very important for evaluation purposes. This study aimed to: (1) find out the role of the Career Centre in distributing the graduates of VSS in Yogyakarta at the workplace; (2) find out the obstacle experienced and its solution. This was evaluation research using the quantitative descriptive approach. The results showed that Career Centre's role was good accumulatively viewed from five aspects: (1) as seeker and provider of employment information; (2) conducting a coaching and employee briefing for students/alumni; (3) regarding stakeholders' partnership; (4) regarding recruitment, selection, and graduate distribution; and (5) graduates tracing. As doing their role, Career Centres faced some obstacles, such as a limited number of administrators, mismatching skills among vocational graduates, less developed IT utilisation, and less organized administrative management. Career Centre's performance has not been optimal thus it needs innovation. Optimizing technology utilisation by creating an information system with important and helpful features will improve the Career Centre in doing their role. Those features will facilitate the students, alumni, and administrators regarding job vacancies and recruitment information, work field recommendation, graduates' tracing, administrative management, etc.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/1833/1/012025/pdf

The innovation of technology utilisation in distributing employee by vocational secondary school career centre

A student-alumni mentor program that combines aspects of academic and workplace mentoring was developed and implemented in a school of social work. Foundation-year MSW students (mentees) were match...

Candra Skrzypek

Papers

Mentoring Connections: Implementing a Student–Alumni Mentor Program in Social Work

Formalizing Alumni Mentoring in Social Work Education: Lessons Learned From a Three-Year Program Evaluation

Enhancing Transformative Social-Emotional Learning with Intergroup Dialogue: An Exploratory Study