EMPACT: Employer-Mentor Partnership for Academic & Career Training

We invited a panel of undergraduate and graduate students from New Mexico State University, the University of Texas at San Antonio, and Tuskegee University to tell us what we don’t know as employers and faculty. We also invited two experts in STEM education at MSIs to share with us the current state and what approaches have worked in practice.

As a pilot, we matched students with mentors for summer research experiences. We followed students participating in various internship and fellowship programs, including partnerships with the US Fish and Wildlife Services, US Forest Service, US Department of Agriculture, Student Conservation Association, and the Chicago Field Museum. We assess the students' and mentors' experiences and attitudes with formative and summative evaluations. Data was collected from students before (survey), during (collected writing and communication deliverables), and after (focus groups) participation to determine satisfaction, skill acquisition, science identity, and sense of belonging.

A key feature of the summer experience was a network of mentoring support that included paired peer-to-peer mentoring, as well as designated faculty and professional mentoring personnel. Findings from the data collected emphasized the value of this networked approach to support as students were able to receive targeted support for different areas of disciplinary expertise, communications, and community engagement, while students also provided one another with invaluable self-reflection and confidence building. Students described their ability to work across professional contexts and with different professional and social contexts as being central to their ability to refine disciplinary expertise and helped them feel that they belonged and had valuable contributions to make to science.

We planned future strategies for building science identity. We identified existing best practices for mentoring and development of mentor-mentee compacts (e.g., Compact Between Biomedical Graduate Students and Their Research Advisors | AAMC). We identified existing programs aimed at improving mentoring expertise and experiences. For example, Georgia State University’s (GSU) Mentoring Enrichment Project (M-RICH, https://casa.gsu.edu/marc-the-mentoring-project/) includes a customizable mentoring handbook. We modified GSU modules/worksheets 1.1 and 4.1 to address UTSA graduate students’ specific needs with regard to belongingness, cultural mismatch, and so forth, using feedback from the surveys described above (see UTSA compact example in Appendix A). We have provided resources for mentors below to understand the importance of family support for mentees’ success. In addition, we identified approaches to connect students’ social networks to the UTSA community. Specifically, The Graduate School worked with students to develop events designed for graduate students’ friends and families. Events were piloted during Spring 2024, including during the Research Symposium that was part of Graduate Student Appreciation Week. We plan to refine these events to attract more members of students’ social networks and increase students’ sense of belongingness.

This report synthesizes recommendations and best practices from our review, conversations, and listening and learning sessions with stakeholders (students, post-docs, university personnel involved in training, and prospective employers). Through this process, we have learned from the stakeholders involved that there are often overlapping as well as individual needs of students, faculty, institutions, and employers. There is commonality in the understanding that mentoring and increasing participation of students from across all cross-sections of society can only be built upon a strong foundation of respect and deep collaboration among all stakeholders. It is essential to build empathy for all students in order to enable trust. In order to establish that trust, academic institutions, trainers, and employers alike must understand the unique needs of the current generation of students, including the barriers to their success and pathways to increase access for all students. Students facing the daunting challenges of higher education require a sense of building, a sense of community in which they can feel nurtured and in which they are mentored in the best way possible to build science identity and identity as future independent researchers, especially as they learn to mitigate experiencing the only too common effects of the imposter syndrome. Best practices must be established to address these issues to ensure the recruitment, retention, full participation, and success of all our students. Below, we present recommendations and best practices designed to address this goal for each of our triad of stakeholder groups (faculty mentors, institutions, employers) in the context of students’ communities. We include the literature informing our recommendations in appendices in order to ensure that the student contribution is recognized, understood and valued and explicitly communicated to all involved.