From career based mentoring programs dating back at least three decades to new programs, some specifically centered in the various culturally diverse campus organizations, mentoring across the University of Minnesota Campus is vibrant and growing. Specific programs within most colleges are career oriented and match students with professionals in the specific field of interest. Other programs actively match university students with youth in local schools or provide culturally diverse mentor/mentee relationships in on-campus organizations. Within several co-curricular programs, particularly directed toward leadership development, both peer mentoring and mentoring that matches students with qualified members of the University and outside community emphasize the career and psychosocial elements that have been identified as basic to a mentoring relationship. Beginning with a brief description of the career-based programs, specific co-curricular leadership programs incorporated in the Office of Student Affairs will be explored. Included is a review of recent mentoring research as well as the relationship of University of Minnesota survey results to mentoring program design. Finally, the direct relationship of mentoring with improvements in University proscribed Student Development Outcomes will be shown.

This paper presents a model for developing leaders who will lead effectively and finish well in their careers. This model has been utilized with graduate students and young professionals in the business world. In addition to the presentation of some general mentoring principles, it describes four crucial building blocks which provide a holistic approach for mentoring leaders through the development of a process utilizing the content of these building blocks. The need for such a model is supported by research and experience in the dropout rate among leaders and in the pressures placed upon emerging leaders in today’s culture.

The emphasis in the mentoring literature appears to focus more on the mentor and creating mentoring programs than on the need for the protégé to prepare for the mentoring relationship. However, mentoring is a learning partnership. A partnership indicats that two parties have a mutually shared investment. The protégé needs to be proactive in preparing him/herself for the mentoring relationship in order to get the best return on that investment of time and effort. A professor in an educational leadership course developed content which taught students the knowledge, skills and dispositions of protégéship. The Framework for Protegeship is included and described. The professor then required students to approach someone to formally mentor them. This article sheds light on the fears that the protégés experienced as they approached a mentor and includes excerpts from their reflective journals, where they report the benefits they received for having entered into mentoring relationships.

This paper describes the design of a mentoring program sponsored by a Women’s Resource Center at one West Coast community college. It also examines the challenges of implementing and sustaining the program. During year one of the mentoring program six of the nine mentors and the program coordinator participated in a research study regarding the program and their experience serving as a mentor. Six themes emerged from the interviews with the participants and subsequent analysis of the data: reflecting on past experience; wanting to help; setting and maintaining boundaries; experiencing strong emotions; relational support from other women; and mentoring as a reciprocal relationship

The University of New Mexico School of Medicine started a mentoring program in 1999 after receiving feedback from faculty that mentoring was one of the top responses to the question “What would you have wanted us to provide you when you started your faculty position to assure your success?” As the process continued, a “First mentor” was added to letters of offer for junior faculty hires. Mentoring of faculty was added to the guidelines for promotion to full professor. Although promotion as an outcomes is difficult to delineate as specifically due to mentoring, we have identified correlations between an extension of assigned mentors to new hires at the senior ranks and a tripling of the number of women and minority faculty members who attained the rank of full Professor resulting in an increase from 3 to 14 total minority faculty members and from 14 to 30% of full Professors who are women.

The nationwide shortage of nurses is predicted to increase over the next five years as the aging nurse force begins to retire at the same time that aging baby boomers demonstrate increased needs for health care and thus nursing care. The education of nurses to meet the work force demands makes it imperative that we examine methods to support retention and progression of nursing students enrolled in our programs. With a current attrition rate of approximately 30% nationwide and near 50% at some programs, the development and evaluation of interventions that foster and promote retention and persistence are necessary measures to mitigate the adverse psychological effects on students as well as the financial costs to students, institutional centers of learning and society. Additionally, measures to support new nurse graduates are needed as they transition to the professional nurse workforce as statistics indicate that turnover rates can be as high as 35 - 60%.

The community college has long been viewed as a doorway of opportunity for nontraditional students including those from immigrant populations, older students and those attempting a second career. This population has resulted in a more diverse pool of nursing applicants who often have lower retention and progression rates. Recent studies demonstrate a relationship between positive psychological outcomes and positive academic performance. Performance is also influenced by perceptions of confidence in ability to persist and perform a task. A number of studies have demonstrated significant findings on the relationships among perceptions of confidence, academic performance and retention of nursing students. Social support has been highly correlated with development of confidence in new nursing graduates.

The creation of a mentoring program in the department of nursing at this community college was an effort to provide a resource for nursing students and new nursing graduates to promote perceptions of confidence as well as provide a social support network to foster retention in a demanding and stressful academic program and profession. Interventions included faculty run workshops for first year nursing students to identify key strategies for successful program completion. Additionally, senior nursing students were recruited and partnered as peer mentors with first year nursing students. Mentor training workshops were created and developed by faculty facilitators, including strategies to address serious problems requiring professional assistance. Senior nursing students were also given an opportunity to dialogue at a forum with former graduates from the program to address questions and concerns about progression to the realities of the professional workplace. As research suggests that social networking is a growing phenomenon and mentoring can occur without face-to-face contact, recent additions to this mentoring program include the development of a Nursing Blog as a resource for new graduates from the program. Data collected demonstrated a significant increase in retention statistics for this program. Qualitative data indicated mentors as well as the mentees felt the value of the experience was positive. This presentation will highlight the outcomes of a research project that employed strategies to promote retention and progression in one Associate Degree Nursing program in an urban setting with a diverse student population. The challenges and rewards of recruiting peer mentors and sustaining an ongoing mentoring assistance program will be discussed.