• Prior to your first meeting with your mentor, consider your short term, immediate, and longer-term goals.
• Prepare a brief “autobiography” to share with your mentor and discuss your vision or life goals. Bearing in mind the vision of your first few years at the institution, focus on what you need to get started. the following list is intended to get you think. I want my mentor to help me:
  • Network
  • Gain a realistic perspective of the academic workplace
  • Gain knowledge of the unwritten “do’s and don’ts”
  • Balance work and other responsibilities and set priorities
  • Challenge myself to achieve new goals and explore alternatives
  • Develop a plan for promotion and tenure
  • Facilitate opportunities for advancement
  • Critique my proposals
  • Invite me to lectures, talks, presentations.
• Set up regularly scheduled meetings with your mentor. Establish a mutually agrred upon time commitment for this activity. Mentors and mentees meet anywhere from an hour a week to an hour a month or less frequently.
• Communicate regularly with your mentor to assure that your needs are met and to extend consideration to your mentor of his/her time.

• Ask about the Instructional Development prgram and course planning workshops.
• Ask to be introduced to the administrators in your department or college, who can assist you with the maze of administrative tasks and paperwork necessary to life on campus.
• Ask about the service available in the Research Office (workshops, proposal preparation assistance, RFP notification listserv).
• Ask to be introduced to the accountant who will oversee the spending of your money in the Contarct and Grant Accounting Office.
• Ask about the important people in your department, discipline, college, institution.
• Ask about your mentor’s own educational, career choices and goals.
• Explore opportunities for collaboration with your mentor either now or in the future.

• Do not let to much time go by without seeing your mentor. Keep the relationship active.
• Try to be focused about your needs during for each meeting,
• Keep track of your scholary activities in teaching and learning (attendance at training workshops), research, and service or outreach

The New Faculty Mentoring Needs Assessment is designed to assist you in developing your needs and goals.

• Issues to consider.