Appendix D – Mentee Needs and Goal Setting Worksheet

Prior to your first meeting, think about what you may want from your mentor. It may be useful to share a summary of your responses to this worksheet with your mentor at your initial meeting.

• Information about tenure and promotion at the University
• Help with career aspirations and goal-setting
• Advice about courses of action to address a specific problem
• Information about family friendly policies and supports
• Someone with whom you can share experiences based on identity markers, e.g. gender, race, class, sexual orientation
• Help with time-management
• Perceptions of how you come across
• Information about how to advance into academic leadership positions
• Help identifying people at the school who can be helpful to you, and how to approach them
• Help identifying people external to the school who can be helpful, and how to approach them
• Thinking through or role-playing difficult situations that you need to negotiate
• Relative importance of teaching, publishing, and service for faculty members at the school
• Tenure and promotion processes and procedures
• Advice about participation in professional organizations and conferences
• Formulation of career goals and timelines
• Balancing personal interests and family time
• Help acquiring or improving skills, such as how to give a talk, how to supervise research assistants, managing classroom dynamics, etc.
• Other:

Use the following form to record career goals. Be realistic and specific.

Set goals in the suggested areas for your first year, and each subsequent year prior to tenure. Then, identify which of your specific career goals your mentor can assist with. Ask your mentor to help identify other people and resources that can facilitate achieving your specific goals. During the first three years in the tenure and promotion process, it may be helpful to review your goals with mentors at least every quarter.

adapted from

• “Faculty Mentoring Toolkit: A Resource for Faculty, Mentors and Administrators” by Luz, C.C. (Ed.), Michigan State University (NSF ADVANCE Grant #0811205), shared with a CC BY NC 4.0 license.