Spotlight on SOTL: Graduate Student Mentorship: How to Avoid Your Students Falling Through the Cracks

This article is based on the following research article:

Hall, W., & Liva, S. (2022). Falling through the Cracks: Graduate Students’ Experiences of Mentoring Absence. Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 13(1), n1.  https://doi.org/10.5206/cjsotlrcacea.2022.1.10957

Graduate students have academic, personal, and professional stressors that significantly impact their mental health. Despite the impact of mentorship on the graduate experience, there is insufficient research on the effects of poor mentorship. The researchers in this article conducted a secondary analysis of fifty-four students and identified the way in which graduate students are currently falling through the cracks when it comes to mentorship.

What did the researchers do and find?

Effective mentorship can help with graduate student success, retention, and motivation to complete, whereas poor mentorship can contribute to the isolating and stressful nature of graduate studies. Through a secondary analysis of fifty-four graduate students in the setting of focus groups, the researchers identified a major theme of graduate students falling through the cracks when it comes to mentorship on four connected fronts.

• First, students described falling through the cracks due to missing mentorship—when mentors lacked commitment and care, students described feeling a violation of their expectations.
• Second, students described falling through the cracks when it came to struggles related to finding mentorship that was a strong fit. Students struggled to identify their own needs and advocate for themselves while seeking mentorship.
• Third, students described falling through the cracks due to university structures that undermine mentorship—there is a lack of administrative attention and university-led initiatives to oversee and improve mentorship.
• Finally, students identified how all of these factors damaged mentees, including adverse outcomes regarding mental health, productivity, and motivation.

How might you use this research in your teaching?

This research illustrates the vulnerable position that graduate students occupy in relation to mentors. In particular, when university-wide structures seek out little oversight and improvement, students can feel reluctant to report poor mentorship or seek help. Since students can struggle to express their needs and might be unsure where to turn for help, those in mentorship roles should aim to support their students on multiple fronts. The researchers suggest that students would benefit from centralized training or workshops about how to respond to bullying or neglect from faculty members and peers. Further, establishing some way for students to pass along anonymous feedback or evaluation on their mentors could help create a way to oversee and improve mentorship without fear on the part of graduate students. Finally, mentors should take advantage of the network of mental health resources and supports at McMaster, especially through the Student Wellness Centre (SWC) https://wellness.mcmaster.ca/resources/.