Role and Responsibilities for Topical Mentors

Thank you for your interest to be a topical mentor in the MGEM program!

As a topical mentor, you will provide strategic and topical expertise to the student for their project. The expectation is that you will provide the student with the research direction, objectives, desired deliverables, and ideally also suggested methods and data needed for the project (not necessary if utilizing publicly available data). Each student will also have a technical mentor assigned to their project to help them navigate technical and methodological issues that arise, so your role as a topical mentor is really to guide the student, ensure that they are getting the resources they need, and that the student is completing their project on time and within your expectations.

Students are required to meet regularly with their topical mentor. The frequency of such meetings, and who else may be involved, should be discussed and agreed upon early on in the project. As a general rule of thumb, we expect that students will be reaching out to schedule a meeting approximately once per month. More frequent meetings may be necessary at times, but please be aware that students have additional coursework commitments that may make scheduling meetings challenging and burdensome. Students are responsible for scheduling all meetings with their topical mentor and bringing questions, examples, and discussion items to each meeting. The topical mentor is responsible for being available to meet with the student, though not necessarily on short notice. If you are mentoring more than one student, then it is suggested that you meet with all your students at the same time so that students have the opportunity to understand how their project fits within your wider research program. It may also be beneficial to schedule all mentor meetings at the outset of the project to avoid scheduling conflicts.

At the end of the program in April, students will present their work publicly and create a poster. Mentors are strongly encouraged to attend those events and support their mentees, but it is not a requirement. Mentors should invite students to present their work directly within the community partner’s organization, too, if such an opportunity is available. Limited travel funding is available to students who wish to present their work at conferences or other knowledge dissemination gatherings.