[bioundgrd] 2024 Bio Dept Mentoring Survey; please participate

[Amy E Keating]

Dear Biology graduate students, UROPs, post-docs, and other lab members (and apologies to those of you on these listserves to whom this doesn’t apply!),

Happy summer! As we wind down the 2023-2024 academic year, I write to request your participation in filling out an anonymous survey to evaluate and help improve mentorship in our department.

This survey should take only 10-15 minutes to complete and is available at the following link:
https://mitresearch.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_0OpqNonK3ljrrXU
Due to the survey layout, we recommend that you complete this on a computer, although it will also work on a phone.

The survey is based closely on the departmental mentoring competencies<https://biology.mit.edu/internal/mentoring-students-and-early-career-scientists/> we established last year, and it seeks input on your experiences and preferences for mentoring by your PI. We seek to capture and track the status of mentoring experiences so we can celebrate areas of success, identify areas that require attention, and direct our ongoing efforts to support mentoring relationships in a data-driven way. We can’t do this without your input.

Please submit your response by Friday, June 30th. To incentivize participation, if we obtain responses from 50% of lab members in Biology Department labs by June 21st, we will arrange for a popup Boba tea event as a thank-you and community celebration.

Thank you in advance for sharing your views and experiences with us.

Best regards,
Amy

Link<https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Rd7Q4He6WzD9k263dCPR3iHVlZW88GdMNCq0Gv-iauA/edit?usp=sharing> to my DH office hours sign-up sheet

Additional Background
One of the key recommendations from last year’s departmental Mentoring Committee<https://docs.google.com/document/d/1T3YA1TsIO4EWrgWvgGhiUubbEJuJyu63W042nu3taAs/edit?usp=sharing> (recommendation 12) was to implement a survey to capture trainees’ experiences in our department. Towards this goal, I charged a new committee - composed of faculty (Iain Cheeseman, Laurie Boyer, Joey Davis, Alison Ringel, Francisco Sanchez-Rivera, and Omer Yilmaz), graduate students (Tobias Coombs, Kelsey Farenhem, and Erika Weiskopf), and post-docs (Melissa Pamula and Alison Wirshing) - with discussing this goal and creating a draft survey. We then obtained feedback from other stakeholders including members of the Biology Graduate Committee, the Biology Faculty DEI committee, last year’s Mentoring Committee, and grad student BioREFs. Finally, we worked closely with the staff in MIT’s Office of Institutional Research (IR), who provided extensive advice and recommended best practices, including how to ensure anonymity for all respondents. The survey then went through beta testing by some of your peers. I’d like to thank everyone involved for the time they invested in getting us to this launch, with special thanks to Iain Cheeseman for his sustained leadership in this area.
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