ALTERNATIVE PROPOSAL FROM THE GRAD STUDENTS FOR GATHERING FEEDBACK
The graduate students came up with an alternative version of getting advisee feedback to advisors which may be much more effective than the proposal from Faculty Council. Here is how it might work:
Ask advisees to provide written feedback on the advising they are getting. This could be structured around a few questions designed by the grads and postdocs. There would be two versions: one that went directly to their advisor ("Direct"), and one that only went to the Mentoring Committee ("Confidential"). The first could be a place for normalizing communications between mentor and mentee about how things are going and how to improve them. The second would be a place for starting a discussion about things a student is not comfortable bringing up openly. What the Mentoring Committee did with the Confidential comments would vary from case to case.
Making this feedback routine (e.g. twice a year like the grad reviews) may make the idea of communicating about mentoring much less intimidating. As in the original proposal, advisees would be free to fill out forms for more than one person - e.g. for a committee member.
Be explicit that any action taken based on Confidential comments in is always at the discretion of the advisee.
We should have a plan in place for how to respond if there is retaliation by an advisor for critical comments from an advisee.
The survey prompts in this proposal could specifically ask for feedback about mentoring during field work and conferences. The survey should also ask about what is working well.
An overall sense of the Direct feedback from the this process could be presented at a Faculty meeting. In addition, if the evaluation by students happened prior to the Semi-Annual Grad Review, it could form part of what faculty discuss and respond to.
We need to have clear guidelines about what happens with the written feedback. Does is go into the advisor's file along with course evaluations? Is it part of what is discussed during promotion and merit review? Or does the feedback remain informal? There are benefits and drawbacks to either approach.
COMMENTS ON THE MENTORING COMMITTEE STRUCTURE
For the composition of the Mentoring Committee: ask interested faculty to volunteer, but then allow the students and postdocs to elect two.
Several people have expressed concern about the proposal to have a staff member on the Mentoring Committee. The goal of that was to have a non-faculty voice in the room. It may however be inappropriate to ask any of our staff to do this.
An alternative to having a staff member on the Mentoring Committee would be to have a "GSR-like" person: a faculty member from one of our related departments in CoEnv such as SAFS, AtmSci, or ESS. This might be helpful in cases where there is a pervasive mentoring problem that we in SoO assume is a necessary part of our culture. It would also be helpful in a case where Confidential comments from the process above are directed at one the Mentoring Committee members. Further, it would give more opportunity for us to learn and benefit from mentoring cultures in other units.OTHER COMMENTS
From an Affiliate faculty member: "I would find the top 5 mentors each year and let them teach young faculty and present their success stories to all faculty."
The nature of the advisor-mentee relationship changes over time. We should recognize that for a new grad student it may be hard to be critical of an advisor's style.
We should work to link this Mentoring proposal to the work of the DEI committee. Ideally better mentoring will make the School more welcoming to members of marginalized groups.
Somewhere on the SoO website there could be a written document describing good mentoring practices. This could be updated annually by the Mentoring Committee based on strengths identified from the evaluations. Here is an example from another institution: student-mentoring-handbook.
From a grad student: "Linking a supervisor's mentoring to annual review, merit review, and promotion decisions gives good incentives for a supervisor to improve mentoring. But I wonder how that impacts supervisors whose primary appointment is not in the School of Oceanography, such as affiliates from the Applied Physics Lab. I don't know what all of that looks like behind the scenes, but I wonder if affiliate faculty supervisors will have any incentive for improving their mentoring besides for its own sake."
OTHER NOTES
The postdocs were not engaged with the process so far - only one showed up for the meetings. It is worth noting that we do very little School-wide mentoring of postdocs: they do not have committees, committee meetings, or semi-annual reviews.