Faculty Mentors

Faculty-to-Student Mentor Program

Faculty Role

Your role as a faculty mentor is to help your student mentees successfully adjust to university life, feel like they are valued members of the university, have a clear sense of purpose, and achieve their educational goals. You will do this by providing your mentee with:

Academic Expertise  |  Career Guidance  |  Psychosocial Support

Faculty Mentor Application

Desired personality characteristics in a mentor include warmth, empathy, self-awareness, balance of demands, integrity, and honesty. Desirable behavioral characteristics include productivity, respect by colleagues, effective communication, availability, and a history of mentoring.
You will be provided guidelines and training about good mentoring practices from the USU Statewide Faculty-to-Student Mentoring Program Steering Committee, for example, how to have positive but realistic discussions about the rigors of college. Each campus will support reasonable expenses for you to provide a quality mentoring experience for your assigned mentees. You will determine the number of mentees you want to mentor. You will be asked to respond to contact in a timely manner. Your total time commitment to participate in this mentoring program each semester is likely to take between 5 and 15 hours.

Faculty Expectations

Meetings

Note: Visits between you and your mentee can occur face-to-face or virtually if there are geographical or social distancing limitations. Your total time commitment to participate in this mentoring program and provide monthly feedback is likely to take between 3 and 13 hours each semester.

During your first meeting, you and your mentee will decide the frequency and modality of your interactions.  This can be revised as needed.  At a minimum, you will be expected to meet with your mentee/s or have monthly contact based on the following:

  • On your first visit, you will meet one-on-one with your mentee and complete the Mentor/Mentee Initial Meeting Guide.
  • During each semester, you will meet face-to-face with your mentees at least twice. These meetings can be done one-on-one or in a group.
  • In months when you don’t visit face-to-face with your mentees, interact with them via email, text, or phone.
  • Complete a monthly reflections survey on each mentee. (This should take about 2 minutes for each mentee.)
  • Attend recruiting and training events at your local campus

Participating in the Research Component

This mentoring program has an optional research component, USU IRB protocol #11217. You can participate in the mentoring program without participating in the research.

The purpose of the research study is to evaluate if this program helps students adjust to university life and persist to graduation. If you have questions about this research study, including the recruiting process, contact the principal investigator:
Jeff Spears at (435)-613-5011 or jeff.spears@usu.edu.

To be included in this study, mentors must be full-time or part-time faculty members at a USU statewide campus. Your total time commitment to participate in the research component of this program is likely to take about 25 minutes the first semester and about 15 minutes in following semesters.

As part of this research component, mentors will be expected to complete the following tasks:

  1. Near the start of your first semester as a mentor, understand and sign the informed consent document. This should take about 10 minutes.
  2. Complete the mentor post-survey during week 14 or 15 of the semester. This should take about 15 minutes.
  3. Repeat step 2 in upcoming semesters.

Once you understand your role and expectations, complete the application form above. This form will let program administrators know if you do or do not want to participate in this mentoring program, and whether you want to participate in the research component. If you choose the research component, you will be further guided to complete the informed consent.