Refining Your Advising Approach: Effective Strategies for Mentoring Graduate Students

Effective graduate advising relationships are critical to the success of both graduate students and faculty advisors. Despite the significance of strong advising relationships, little work has focused on promoting graduate advising as a mutually beneficial activity that creates value for both faculty and graduate students. In this special session, the facilitators aim to bridge this disconnect by sparking faculty participants' curiosity in discussing and reflecting on their current advising approaches and adapting their current advising practices to be more mutually valuable. The session will cover topics such as scaffolded mentoring, the Situated Expectancy Value Theory of Motivation and its connection to graduate advising, and evidence-based practices for effective advising. The special session is intended for engineering and computing graduate faculty advisors interested in improving their advising practices and is expected to result in revised mentoring strategies and approaches co-constructed with peer and facilitator input. The session will be facilitated by Mayra Artiles, Rachel Kajfez, Holly Matusovich, and Amanda Singer.