Mentoring in Academia: An Exploration of Mentoring Relationships Between Graduate Students and Faculty Members

193 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2001.An interview study and a web survey study were conducted to investigate the mentoring relationships between graduate students and faculty members. Participants in the interview study were 32 (16 female, 16 male) graduate students registered in one of 7 randomly selected academic departments at a large Midwestern university. Participants in the web survey were and independent sample of 278 graduate students (150 female, 128 male) enrolled in one of 18 academic departments at the same university. The results of the interview and survey studies, together, suggest several conclusions about the mentoring of graduate students by faculty members. First, students' experiences in their mentoring relationships were very positive, and students who had not established such relationships did not fare as well as those who had. Furthermore, women were less likely to have a mentor, but were very successful if their mentor was also female. Not having a mentor was especially detrimental to students in humanities and social science departments, but not for those in physical/natural science departments. Second, students wanted and seemed to benefit from having more than one mentor. Third, students thought almost all positive traits are important in a mentor, but there was some disagreement over whether the sex of a mentor was important. Fourth, though there were some differences by sex composition of departments, these differences did not strongly support the predictions made by expectation states theory or proportionality theory for mentoring relationships. These differences were much clearer when examined in terms of the differences in the content areas across departments.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD