Entering Mentoring News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Aurora Washington and Rebekah Layton advise students from historically excluded groups on the benefits of networking, mentoring up and career planning. Navigating graduate school can feel like taking the road trip you had been dreaming about but with an outdated road map. One of the authors of this essay, Aurora, thought getting into her dream graduate program would be smooth sailing if she produced quality research and excelled in her classes. Little did she know that she, in fact, needed to excel in an underlying invisible curriculum.

Although institutions of higher education have placed a large emphasis on increasing the number of underrepresented minority (URM) students matriculating in higher education, the disparities in STEM retention and graduation rates between URM and non-URM students emphasize the dire need for increased support to help URM students navigate challenges including stereotype threat, impostor phenomenon, and lack of social connectedness that disproportionately affect URM students in majority-dominated fields. Prior research has demonstrated that structured mentoring has the potential to generate subst...