Success in Mentoring Your Student Researchers: Moving STEMM Forward

This book is a guide for mentors on how to recruit, mentor, and support students through a student research experience in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM) fields. Being a successful research mentor benefits from the self-awareness and planning, strategies and skills that Success in Mentoring your Student Researchers can help you build and develop. These are useful for mentors working with any students, but especially those who have been minoritized in STEMM or are the first in their family to attend college.

The first part of the book introduces mentoring undergraduates and how it differs from traditional classroom instruction, active learning, and flipped classrooms; mentoring is collaboratively teaching research while doing research. A mentored undergraduate research experience also helps your mentees develop the skills necessary to be successful scientists and become part of STEMM communities. The central partof the book presents the undergraduate research experience as a “three-legged stool” whose legs—research, education, and community—each have unique values in advancing your mentees’ path in STEMM and all of which require setting, communicating, and realizing expectations for “success”—your mentees’ and your own. The last part of the book looks beyond the research experience, from evaluating your success as a mentor through helping your mentees to continue to develop and grow their STEMM careers and become mentors themselves.

This book is the mentor’s companion to the authors’ book for students, “Success in Navigating your Student Research Experience: Moving Forward in STEMM.”