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 teaching assistant 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 twice per term (2 times in term 1 September-December, 2 times in term 2 January-March) with their topical mentor. As topical mentor, you will complete a short online form to report the student’s progress at the meeting. You can access this password-protected form on the Mentor Portal page. Students are responsible for scheduling all meetings with their topical mentor, and the topical mentor is responsible for making themselves available to meet with the student. 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.