Reflections of a protégé

The Social Construction of Mentoring Roles

“…The extraordinary accomplishments of Socrates and Plato, Aristotle and Alexander the Great, Anne Sullivan and Helen Keller, and Freud and Jung (Parkay, 1988) substantiate the mentoring myth that certain relationships can greatly in uence a person's course in life. Although such famous mentoring relationships seem larger than life, most people can identify with the experience on a less grand scale.…”

“…Identifying a relationship as mentoring most often occurs in hindsight as the person realizes the great in uence the mentor has had on him/her (Epstein, 1981). For this reason, researchers have explored the nature of mentoring relationships through retrospective studies (Hardcastle, 1988) and phenomenological methods (Parkay, 1988). The participants in these cases have had time to construct meaning from their experiences.…”

A Promising Prospect for Minority Retention: Students Becoming Peer Mentors

“…The intent of this program, as is typical of many other support programs, was to improve retention rates of minority students within a given area of study and hopefully, capitalize on the benefits of the program for marketing purposes and recruiting of additional minority students into a college of engineering. The program encompassed many components, from formal tutorial instruction to informal dinners and celebrations, in which peer mentors played a vital role and, as suggested by Parkay's (1988) definition, inducted their fledgling students into the engineering "way of life. "…”

Mentoring and Relational Mutuality: Protégés' Perspectives

“…The theme of mentoring relationships has been widely discussed in the literature from the perspectives of the developmental sequence or phases of mentoring (Chao, 1997;Gehrke, 1988aGehrke, , 1988bKram, 1983Kram, ,1985; differences between formal and informal mentoring (Chao, Walz, & Gardner, 1992;Fagenson-Eland, Marks, & Amendola, 1997;Gerstein, 1985;Noe, 1988;Redmond, 1990), mentoring with nondominant groups (Burke & McKeen, 1997;Dreher & Dougherty, 1997;Kalbfleisch & Davies, 1991;Mullen, 1997Mullen, ,1998Ragins, 1997;Wilson, 1988), and characteristics in both the mentor and the prot6g6 that promote positive mentoring (Allen et al, 1997;Noe, 1988;Parkay, 1988).…”