Core Practices to Cultivate Impactful Student-Mentor Relationships

On Friday September 6th, the Earth Grant community came together to participate in an activity that we’ve facilitated at every annual intern-mentor orientation, an activity geared towards supporting impactful and growth-oriented experiences for both our students and our mentors. In order for us all to be able to learn and grow together over this next academic year, we need to first learn more about each other and the values and beliefs that we each carry to establish a mutual understanding of the behaviors and expectations that we will hold both ourselves and each other accountable to throughout our time together. 

In making space for this conversation, Earth Grant scholars and mentors engaged in discussions around what specific assumptions to ground their work in, and the details of how to act and behave throughout their time together to uphold those fundamental values. The following practices are what we collectively believe are vital to cultivating growth in a healthy professional mentorship.  

Above all, our participants emphasized the vitality of healthy and effective communication for the student-mentor dynamic. Making space for consistent conversation and discussion encourages curiosity and learning while ensuring a shared understanding of collaborative work tasks and upholding transparency about the professional workplace and industry landscape. This allows scholars to view an honest perspective of the conditions and circumstances of the professional roles of their mentors and colleagues in a constructive manner, towards better informed decisions about their career. The mentors also stressed that communication throughout this experience should be meaningful. In other words, it takes much more than icebreakers and weekly task delegation for a student to be able to see the value of their work and the impact of the organization that they’ve been partnered with.  

Meaningful dialogue can come in many forms, and feedback in particular is critical to facilitating growth and reciprocity in a professional space. As mentors shared, interns should feel comfortable asking questions, and asking all kinds of them. To encourage these conversations, mentors should share an open minded perspective with their scholars, inviting them to brainstorm ideas or reflect on experiences. Reflection is a foundational practice for giving constructive feedback, and making intentional space for both mentors and scholars to engage in this allows both to maintain an open-minded perspective and feel more comfortable in the workplace. 

Feeling respected in a professional space is a common struggle, but one that can be effectively addressed by first learning to respect each others’ boundaries. Every colleague has their own reserves of time and capacity that fluctuate in availability, unique to each individual on a daily basis. Learning to adapt to your mentor or scholar’s schedule and capacity is an important part of respecting each other’s boundaries, but it’s only effective when both are aware of each other’s capacity. Consistent communication and transparency are vital to that awareness, but when things fall through the cracks, don’t waste time jumping to the worst scenarios and assuming a lack of integrity in others. This will encourage dishonesty by sending messages that lead others to feel disrespected and undervalued. Best practice is to assume the best in your mentor or intern and offer them the benefit of the doubt. People often tend to excuse overstepping work-life boundaries with time-sensitive deadlines and urgent project needs, but if the work itself has a clearly established direction, there shouldn’t be a need to complete action items outside of planned work hours. 

Interns may appreciate a mentor’s trust in their leadership capabilities, but projects without support or structure from mentors can very quickly become daunting and abstract from the intern’s perspective. Complete leadership and independence is not recommended unless the scholar has all of the needed knowledge and skills, and doesn’t that defeat the purpose of an experiential learning experience? Mentorship makes space for guidance on what values to center the project in, whether refocus or redirection is needed, and how to accomplish goals within a feasible timeline. Direction should also be driven by the community and place your project or organization serves, as some Earth Grant mentors mentioned the importance of honoring Indigenous perspectives and the history of the local Santa Cruz River.