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Department of Internal Medicine: Faculty Mentoring Program

For Mentors

Successful Mentors

Qualities for Success

  • Exhibit admirable personal qualities, including enthusiasm, compassion, and selflessness.
  • Act as a career guide, offering a vision but purposefully tailoring support to each mentee.
  • Make strong time commitments with high-quality meetings.
  • Support work-life balance.
  • Leave a legacy of how to be a good mentor through role modeling and instituting policies that set global expectations and standards for mentorship.

Mentor Self-Assessment

As a mentor, are you available? Do you appreciate individual differences? Are you able to use self-direction and questioning in guiding your mentee? Do you celebrate your mentee’s success? Are you able to provide your mentee with not only skill development but networking opportunities, as well?

Please read Nature’s Guide for Mentors and complete the validated Mentor Self Assessment.

Who Can Be Part of the Mentoring Committee?

  • Chair of the mentoring committee is an associate or full professor in the Department of Internal Medicine.
  • The chair of the mentoring committee should be on the same pathway.
  • Other members may be from outside the division or outside the Department of Internal Medicine.
  • Ideally, one mentor should be recently promoted to associate professor in the Department of Internal Medicine.
  • Division chiefs cannot serve on the mentoring committee for faculty members in their division in order to enhance open discussion of potential issues.
  • Members of the mentoring committee can be modified to meet the needs of the mentee.

Roles and Responsibilties

Mentor Roles and Responsibilities

  • Know the Promotion and Tenure (P&T) Guidelines
  • Know the mentee’s pathway, FTE, time in rank, and effort allocation
  • Evaluate the mentee’s performance according to the UAMS and College of Medicine Promotion and Tenure guidelines in the following areas:
    • Clinical service
    • Research
    • Teaching
    • Administrative service
    • Other scholarly activity
    • Professional recognition
  • Discuss work-life balance and avoidance of burnout
  • Discuss strategic career planning and goal setting
  • Provide mentee feedback on other issues that arise
  • Review and approve the mentoring committee minutes

Mentoring Chair Roles and Responsibilities

  • All of the mentor expectations
  • Ensure meeting with mentoring committee and mentee at least twice per year
  • Lead the mentoring committee meeting
  • Be available between meetings to the mentee for additional mentoring needs
  • Obtain approval of the mentoring committee minutes from mentee and mentoring committee members before submission
  • Provide mentoring committee minutes to the Faculty Mentoring Program director

Traits of a Good Mentor

  • Committed: A good mentor takes the time to provide guidance on a wide range of professional topics.
  • Demanding: A good mentor sets and models high standards.
  • Respectful: A good mentor views the mentee as a valuable but inexperienced colleague.
  • Adaptable: A good mentor recognizes that mentees have different strengths and needs.
  • Encouraging: A good mentor helps the mentee through the low spots encountered in any academic career.
  • Proactive: A good mentor does not wait for the mentee to contact him/her but provides opportunities for contact.
  • Nurturing: A good mentor finds ways to ensure that the mentee is ready to compete in their respective professional fields.

Career Development

Individual Career Development Plan

One of the critical responsibilities of a high-quality mentoring relationship is to aid the mentee in setting and achieving short and long-term career goals.

We encourage mentees to utilize the template in establishing career goals.

Individual Career Development Plan (IDP)

Mentoring Map

By visualizing your network of mentoring relationships, and keeping the mentee’s professional or personal goals in mind, you can identify which relationships will help the mentee reach those goals. These could be the people in your network.

Please complete the Mentoring Map

Mentor Case Studies

Mentors often encounter challenging situations during the mentor-mentee relationship. Case studies are available when encountering situations such as:

  • Rewards & challenges of mentorship
  • Communicating effectively with mentees
  • Balancing work-life
  • Understanding diversity among mentees
  • Understanding economic and fiscal realities for a successful academic career
  • Grants and the IRB
  • Leadership skills – how to build a research team

https://accelerate.ucsf.edu/training/mdp-cases