Nicole Humphrey is a senior in the School of Public Affairs & Administration at the University of Kansas, McNair Scholar, and Undergraduate Research Assistant on the Sociolegal Justice Project.
 
Mentorship is an essential component when developing scholars, but much of the scholarship on mentorship provides mentors with broad directions about how to successfully execute mentoring relationships. Kram (1988) proposes that mentorship falls within two main channels: career functions and psychological functions.[1] Although this information is helpful in providing mentors with general guidance about what their roles need to encompass, it does not provide specific insights on how they can create and maintain productive and beneficial relationships with their students. I’m currently working on a long-term project exploring best practices in mentoring by gathering data from mentors and mentees, but here I draw on my own experiences to provide some quick pointers on practices my mentor uses that I find helpful.

1. Connect your students with other students.
 
My mentor uses a nested mentoring model. If you’re interested in reading more about the model see: http://www.culjp.com/blog/portillo-nested-mentoring.
Here, I’ll provide a quick summary about why I think it works. When I joined my mentor’s research team, I joined at the same time as another student, Phyllis*. Having Phyllis made the initial process of starting research much easier. Along with having Phyllis, there were two students who had been working on the project for the past year, Angela and Meredith. The senior research assistants had more experience than Phyllis and I, but they were in our same position not long ago, so they were able to provide a lot of insight on the process and answer questions that we didn’t want to bother our professor with. This structure provided me with support and accountability – two essential components to completing any research project.  

2. Tell your students what you actually do at work.
 
When I started college, I didn’t know that professors had obligations outside of teaching. I eventually learned that professors conduct research, but I still had no idea what the process actually entailed. After joining my mentor’s research team, I quickly figured out that research is a process… a really long process. You have to understand current and past literature, gather data, determine the findings of your data, triple check to make sure your findings are correct, write so many drafts of a paper that you lose track of which draft you just finished writing, and then present your work. And this is just what I’ve gathered about the research process so far. I assume there will be more to learn in the future.  
 
When mentoring students pursuing research careers, tell them what you do every day. Tell them about difficult situations you’ve faced while teaching, how you stay motivated carrying-out a long research project, and cultural norms within your field that they will one day be expected to follow.

3. Show that you had to develop your research skills.
 
A few weeks ago, I was reading The Administrative State by Dwight Waldo. The complexity of the book was starting to frustrate me to the point that I had few intentions of finishing it. To help me understand the main concepts, my mentor sent me a paper she wrote her first-year of graduate school that covered the book’s major themes. Before I could open the document, she was sure to tell me not to send it to anyone because it wasn’t very good. She was right... it wasn’t very good. The writing in that paper looked nothing like the writing I’ve seen in her published articles. This sounds irrational, but I assumed that my mentor showed up to her first-day of grad school able to write published articles. I was wrong, and I’m really happy I was wrong. Seeing that it took time for her to improve her writing skills gives me a lot of hope for my own abilities.

 
[1] Kram, K.E. (1988). Mentoring at Work. New York: University Press of America.
 
*I’ve used pseudonyms throughout to protect the privacy of other students on the team.

Shannon Portillo  is an Associate Professor and Undergraduate Program Coordinator at the School of Public Affairs & Administration at the University of Kansas. She is also a Board Member of the Consortium for Undergraduate Law & Justice Programs.

My former colleague, and good friend, Danielle S. Rudes originally turned me onto the nested mentorship model.[1] In my current work, I’ve been able to adapt this model to build a team of undergraduate and graduate research assistants studying how we conceptualize justice in sociolegal scholarship. While future posts will discuss the project specifically, here I want to discuss the nested mentorship model. The nested mentorship model builds off of a “see, hear, do” approach, exposing students to research.

Students are first introduced to research by seeing all of the pieces from proposals to finished publications. I typically show them a previously published journal article on a similar subject to what we are going to study. If it is possible, I start with early drafts of funding proposals so students can get a feel for how I originally envisioned the work. They I guide them through a few iterations of manuscripts, and eventually show them the finished product – a published article. During this “see” process I want to show them that, scholars, published academics, their professors, edit and revise. Things rarely go according to plan, and we never “turn in” or publish a first draft. I want to instill in them a culture of editing and continual refinement and progress.

Then, students “hear” about the research process by talking with scholars immediately senior to them. While I might seem like a distant authority figure to the students when we’re first starting out, I want them to hear from students a bit closer to their reality. They talk with graduate students and senior undergraduate students who have worked on research with me. That lays a foundation for expectations and the culture of our research team.

Finally, students “do” by participating in the project. We develop students’ skills incrementally so the research process does not overwhelm them. In my current project students are helping to code articles. Trainings for coding include a faculty member, graduate student and senior undergraduate so students can hear from people with different experience levels and have access to people who have recently developed the skills they are learning as well as leaders on the project.

The undergraduate research assistants (UGRAs) actively engage in the research process. From coding, to methodological reasoning, and from analysis to theory building, I try to foster an active learning environment for research assistants at all levels. The hands-on experience empowers students to navigate the iterative, rigorous research process and explore their intellectual potential in a way unique from traditional coursework. Because many of the students hold underrepresented identities, they experience newfound collegiality working in the nested mentor model. They often find connections with other students with similar experiences, as well as graduate students who they can relate to and inquire about potential next academic steps.

Exposing students to a team of mentors not only benefits them, but also makes my time and commitment to project leadership more manageable. Students often rely on each other and create a culture of support and socialization without constant hands-on supervision from me as the faculty member. The model is fluid rather than hierarchical, and students always have access to a team of mentors. Students access mentorship from UGRAs immediately their senior as much as, if not more than, graduate students and faculty on the project. The access and camaraderie build confidence and allow students to find their scholastic voice.

I’d love to hear more about your experiences with mentorship and undergraduate student research assistants in the comments below.

[1] See the following for a full discussion of our earlier work with undergraduate student researchers in the classroom: Portillo, Shannon, Danielle S. Rudes, Lincoln Sloas, Kirsten Hutzell and Paula Salamoun (2013). “Students as Scholars: Integrating Research into the Undergraduate Classroom Experience” Journal of Criminal Justice Education 24(1): 68-96.