CANDID COMMENTS ON MENTORING UNDERGRADUATES AT CITY COLLEGE

Professors Joseph Barba and Douglas R. Troeger

Our experience as Co-PIs on a Minority Institution Infrastructure grant (NSF CISE CDA-9114481, awarded 1991) with a substantial mentoring component suggests that mentoring undergraduates is hard. Most mentoring relationships succeed in nurturing students to some extent; relatively few achieve their most important goal, which we take to be leading students to a significant problem-solving experience. Because these experiences are often the penultimate step in a student's first emergence as an independent and creative thinker, they are of central importance to a student's development and ultimate success.

Effective mentoring requires an awareness of constraints. Accordingly, we list those factors which impact most heavily on the College's ability to provide mentoring experiences for undergraduates.

• Students arrive on campus not prepared for college-level courses. Students are brought down by their poor academic preparation, their frequently inadequate English skills, by their tendency to confuse effort with success, and by poorly defined academic expectations. Many minority students suffer immeasurable harm from low self-esteem, timidity in approaching faculty, and hesitancy in assuming a questioning stance towards course material, resulting in their being content with passing performance when they are in fact capable of much more. All of these factors impact seriously on students' readiness for research mentorships as upperclassmen.

• Students often view the College as nothing more than a place to take courses. Many students do not recognize the necessity of reaching beyond their classwork, of investing more than the minimum time in their education. When combined with the need to support themselves, the result is that many students do not dialogue amongst themselves, do not participate in professional organizations, do not avail themselves of enrichment opportunities provided by the College, and tend not to get to know the faculty. These problems are exacerbated by the commuter nature of the college.

• Students are frequently unprepared by the lower-division for problem-solving mentorships. A student who has spent years passively taking notes and exams in chalkboard courses is unlikely to blossom in a senior-year mentorship into an independent, confident and critical thinker. A student who has never been challenged - creatively as well as analytically - by his or her coursework may not have developed the self-confidence and resilience to persist in solving a hard problem, or to weather careless or insensitive remarks on the part of overworked mentors. Students who have done little more than solve short-term book exercises as underclassmen are unlikely as upperclassmen to:

- know their own academic tastes and strengths (with negative consequences for their selection of both a topic and a mentor),

- understand that most research questions transcend the boundaries of individual courses,


- have developed expertise with basic tools.

• Optional participation of faculty as mentors. Should all faculty be encouraged to participate in mentoring? We believe the answer to be 'yes', given:

- that undergraduate mentoring is a crucial activity, central to the academic health of the institution,

- that mentoring is an intense activity fully likely to result in burn-out if focused on too few faculty,


- that in the absence of widespread participation, most faculty will perceive the reward structure to be biased against mentoring.

• Optional student participation as mentees. Many students with the potential for excellence do not know - or do not believe - that they have this potential. Such students - along with the rest of the vast majority of students who do not intend to go on to graduate school - are deprived of what could be the most satisfying and important component of their undergraduate education by a policy relegating mentoring experiences to optional status, as they will generally not elect these experiences of their own accord. Additionally, a policy of optional mentorship does nothing to dissuade students from the perception that exams in courses are the real stuff of academic life. With that perception in force, work connected to the mentorship is never given the priority it needs.
  
  
• Faculty do not encourage students to meet with them outside of the classroom. A mentorship can easily flounder on personality differences between mentor and mentee; a student who has never talked to a faculty member outside of class is unlikely to have formed an accurate idea of that person's research and whether it will sustain his or her interest. Faculty must come to view lecturing and grading as just part of their teaching responsibility. We note that the mere posting and holding of office hours is seldom an adequate response to this need.
  
  
• Faculty have low expectations of students.
  
  
• Administration view that mentoring is easy. We have noted that many administrators tend to regard undergraduate mentoring as a trivial obligation which faculty ought to be able to discharge in their spare time. In our experience, it takes much more effort than one might expect before faculty are even remotely adept at mentoring undergraduates.
  
  
• Premature placement of students into a research project. All too often underclassmen struggle to balance the obligations imposed by their position in an undergraduate research program with the demands imposed by their courses. In an academic culture which classifies mentoring and research experiences as 'extras', in which GPA is the all-determining arbiter of success, and in which the research programs themselves require students to take five or six hard courses each term, it is not surprising that the great majority of lower-division research mentorships end with the student having been tantalized by research without having participated in it. What are the long-term effects of the resulting frustration? Has the research program contributed to a further fragmentation of the student's attention, thereby contributing to a decline in their GPA? Has the pool of faculty mentors been reduced by the discouragement experienced when a student's over-commitment is misinterpreted as a lack of interest or commitment? Does our reluctance to label such experiences as anything but successful leave students with a conception of "research" which, in the long term, does their careers more harm than good?
  
  
• The view that the only successful mentorship is one which leads to a graduate school fellowship. While we believe it is desirable for every mentee to be presented with the responsibility of delivering a document describing the outcomes of the work accomplished, for many - even most - students, the faculty expectation of a 'mini-Ph.D.' experience will prove a constant source of discouragement. Mentorships, even for last-year students, must be level-appropriate: students who have solved challenging problems will benefit from that experience, whether they make their career in academia or in industry.

• a belief in the process and in the students,
  
  
• a commitment to make the necessary time available to students,
  
  
• a willingness to impose on the mentoring process a standard every bit as high as that imposed on research,
  
  
• high expectations for student performance,
  
  
• a willingness to experiment and to be flexible.