Hi Jeff, thanks for your post. Mentorship is an integral component of our current project. Our dissertators not only have their research mentors, but they also have a teaching mentor, a near-peer mentor, and an alumni mentor that they are paired with. The teaching mentor is there to support their microteaching experiences and to provide additional pedagogy support. The near-peer and alumni mentors are there to support professionally and personally. Many times the conversations and mentoring are based on shared stories or an understanding of what the fellow is going through within their labs, graduate studies, or life.  The relationships continue throughout the time they are in the program as well as up to 3 years post-graduation, many have become friends for life.  

Our overall program goal is to develop, implement, study, institutionalize, evaluate and disseminate a model focusing on career development for historically underrepresented minority (URM) doctoral degree students in STEM, who successfully transition into early-career STEM faculty positions at predominantly undergraduate institutions (PUIs), or who enter postdoctoral STEM scholar positions and then transition into early-career STEM faculty positions at PUIs. 

We are now in the process of considering what our next project will be and what impact we want to make in the future, these are conversations we are currently having and in the early stages of developing our future plans.

What we are introducing through our current project is an "AGEP Academy" and this is for our graduate students that fit the AGEP ritceria but are not yet dissertators. This program will focus on career exploration with an emphasis on academia. I hope this answers all your questions. Thanks for watching and for engaging us.

Thank you for your comments and thoughtful questions.

Mentoring is central to our project. Fellows are matched with teaching mentors at the PUIs through a comprehensive process. It includes interviews with the fellows to understand their  learning and communication styles. Interviews also insights into the value each scholar places on mentoring.  In addition to teaching mentors, scholars are also paired with mentors at BNL, alumni mentors and, of course, research mentors.

Our first cohort was formed as COVID led to extensive closures here in New York, leading to delays in research completion for most of our AGEP fellows. One fellow who earned her doctorate accepted a post-doc position with a national laboratory. Three fellows from this cohort have taught ( or will this summer) as adjuncts at our PUIs.

We are looking at how mentoring relationships are maintained and valued after the micro-teaching experience. Our thinking, which is reflected in the literature, is that such sustained relationships are essential to early career faculty.

That sounds like a great constellation of support/mentorship for your fellows, particularly the way you've structured support along different dimensions (e.g., teaching mentoring as distinct from research mentorship). 

Sorry to hear about covid-related problems, although that seems to be the case for all of us over the last two years, trying to do our best in an impossible set of circumstances.

Mentorship maintenance over time also makes sense for early-faculty success. Anecdotally, I've seen examples of how mentorship, or the lack thereof, can have a huge impacts early on. 

Hi Sarah, thank you for your comments and support and great questions as well. This year in particular, with in-person meetings resuming, we have seen tremendous growth in the relationships between teaching mentors and mentees. They meet regularly and complete a reflection on their interactions, as mentioned in a previous comment, some of these relationships have led to our fellows becoming adjuncts. The reflections help keep the mentors accountable and assist us as an Alliance to see if there are any issues we need to address. The mentor relationship that I believe has been the most difficult to navigate has been the near-peer/alumni relationships and that is because many of them are long-distance relationships. Developing those pairs and matching them appropriately take the most time and then having a long-distance relationship from the start can be difficult to, but we have also had success teams since meeting over Zoom could be easier than coordinating 2 very busy schedules to meet in person. 

We have been fortunate that our mentors, in all aspects, have been dedicated to the project and truly want to work with our fellows and help them to develop successfully. They believe in our mission and the goal of the program and want to be part of the growth of our fellows.

Thank you for your comments. As mentioned by my colleagues, mentors are assigned using a holistic matching process that includes interviews with both the mentors and the student participants. As for research at the national laboratory, several of our research mentors have joint appointments with BNL. This allows their students to get first-hand experience using the DOE Lab facilities. Additionally, our students and teaching mentors have the opportunity to participate in workshops on how to become a user of the facilities and build research collaborations with FFRDCs in general. The goal is to have our participants engage with these laboratories themselves and with their students for many years to come. We also have AGEP alum who have made themselves available to mentor current AGEP students. One such alum is a Radiochemist at BNL and one of the only black women in her field. She was also the first African American to earn a PhD in Radiochemistry at her institution. 

Hi Iris, thank you for visiting our page and for viewing our video. Our project recruits URM PhD candidates in a STEM field. Our mentors from our FFRDC do an amazing job of working with our fellows to provide them an opportunity to collaborate with other national labs. They also provide our fellows with micro-teaching experiences and teaching mentorship. As an Alliance we have been very fortunate to have the staff at Brookhaven National Lab as an integral part of our team and we are excited as well to see the impact we can continue to make for URM STEM PhD candidates. Thank you again for watching.