Mentoring in a Graduate Counseling Program: Students Helping Students

Abstract

This article presents a student-to-student mentoring program, which matches current and incoming students to ease the new student's transition to and involvement i n graduate schml.Admission to graduate study begins a period of unavoidable life changes, challenges, and'difflcult transitions. Studies have consistently shown that new students are at risk for physical and psychological problems and moderate to major crises during their fist semester of graduate school (Goplerud, 1980;Halleck. 1976;Kuh & Thomas, 1983;Valdez, 1982). Over half of first-year and secondyear graduate students scored in the crisis category on the Holmes and Rahe (1967) Social Readjustment Rating Scale (Goplerud, 1980;Valdez, 1982

Mentoring College Students: A Critical Review of the Literature Between 1990 and 2007

“…Finally, program evaluation was a primary method of 12 of the reviewed studies (e.g., Bowman and Bowman 1990;Carlson and Single 2000;Crawford et al 1996;Lloyd and Bristol 2006;Mangold et al 2003;Pagan and Edwards-Wilson 2003;Quinn et al 2002), which largely centered on programmatic issues rather than on broad forms of assistance provided to students. As such, students' mentoring experiences were presumed to include formalized conversations with faculty and/or participation in arranged events or activities with a faculty mentor.…”

“…The focus of the large majority of the empirical investigations reviewed herein (69%) centered on mentoring undergraduate students (e.g., Atkins and Williams 1995;Carlson and Single 2000;Freeman 1999;Rodger and Tremblay 2003;Strayhorn and Terrell 2007) while roughly a third of studies have provided evidence to support the impact of mentoring graduate students (e.g., Bowman and Bowman 1990;Fiason 1996;Hadjioannou et al 2007), and only one study broadly studied both student populations (Lloyd and Bristol 2006). Two of the 42 reviewed studies were novel in attempting to understand mentoring through the lens of the mentor including Carlson and Single (2000) who presented quantitative and qualitative mentoring outcomes, as reported by both students and mentors, and Reddick (2006) who studied the mentoring relationships of African American students at predominantly White institutions through the lens of four African American professors using a grounded theory approach.…”

“…Although the majority of recent studies centering on graduate students have focused on identifying the characteristics or process of mentoring, a few recent studies have attempted to assess the prevalence of mentoring relationships (e.g., Kador and Lewis 2007;Lloyd and Bristol 2006;Paglis et al 2006), factors impacting students' potential for mentoring (Green and Bauer 1995), and/or the impact of mentoring graduate students on outcome variables (Bowman and Bowman 1990;Hadjioannou et al 2007;Melrose 2006;Paglis et al 2006). Most notably, Hadjioannou et al (2007) self-examined the high levels of stress and anxiety associated with doctoral work.…”

“…It should be noted that this ambiguity surrounding the definition of mentoring is further obscured by inconsistencies in how the ''mentoring'' has been used throughout the literature. For instance, while some researchers have used the term mentoring to describe specific set of activities conducted by a ''mentor'' (e.g., Bowman and Bowman 1990;Brown et al 1999;Campbell and Campbell 1997;Freeman 1999;Watson 1999), other researchers have defined mentoring in terms of a concept or process (e.g., Anderson and Shannon 1988;Blackwell 1989;Roberts 2000).…”

Future Colleague or Convenient Friend: The Ethics of Mentorship

“…In a recent study, more than 65% of graduate students in psychology reported having been mentored at some point during their programs (Clark, Harden, & Johnson, 2000). Although the number of empirical studies is limited, current research has consistently supported the value, for both students and faculty, of mentoring relationships in graduate programs, with the degree of student satisfaction exceeding 90% (R. L. Bowman, Bowman, & DeLucia, 1990;Busch, 1985;Clark et al, 2000;Luna & Cullen, 1998). Mahoney (in press) has been a strong advocate for the development of safe, nurturing, mentoring relationships, viewing these relationships as vital in the successful training of counselors.…”