Sociology student Mel Jeske has received an honorable mention for the 2021 Dean’s Award for Excellence in Mentoring for Graduate Students and Postdoctoral Scholars! Now in its third year, this award was developed to help promote a culture of mentorship at UCSF, and to recognize the diversity of peer support and leadership among our graduate students and postdoctoral scholars who contribute to that culture. The GradDiv received an impressive total of over 70 submissions.
Congrats, Mel!
The purpose of this award is to recognize graduate students (both master's and PhD students) and postdoctoral scholars who consistently serve as excellent mentors for their colleagues. This may include other graduate and postdoctoral scholars, staff, and/or undergraduate and high school students visiting from other institutions. These awards exemplify our efforts to support a mentoring culture that encourages diversity and increases equity in the biomedical, social, and population sciences.
This award intends to recognize the contributions of graduate students and postdoctoral scholars who have formally or informally taken on some of the responsibilities typically held by traditional mentors, supervisors, and sponsors during their training. These forms of mentorship roles often look like the following:
Traditional mentors offer psychological and emotional support, teaching and training, career support, and role modeling.
Supervisors set mentee research goals, assess baseline levels of knowledge and understanding, provide positive and corrective feedback, evaluate progress, manage conflicts, enforce consequences and provide support to trainees.
Sponsors actively connect mentees to opportunities and advocate for mentees to receive rewards and promotions.
The award recognizes three areas of mentoring that incorporate some of these aspects, as well as other areas that are more specific to the leadership roles UCSF graduate students and postdoctoral scholars often take. These areas are described in more depth below.
- Research mentoring
- Career and professional mentoring
- Social and inspirational mentoring