CSW MentorNet Event @ The Faculty Club

By Cecelia Lei

             Known as one of the premier research institutions in the nation, UCSD has been making great scientific and technical strides through faculty, research and education programs.  As part of the university’s effort to include greater numbers of both women and racial minorities in these fields of study, UCSD invited Dr. Carol Muller, founder, president and CEO of MentorNet, on March 1, 2007 to speak at the university’s Faculty Club.  The event, titled Mentoring for Success: Find a Mentor, Be a Mentor, highlighted the importance of building mentor-protégé relationships as a way of contributing to the academic progress and career of women and underrepresented groups in scientific and technological fields.

            Chancellor Marye Anne Fox provided the introductory remarks for the event.  Having served on the advisory board of MentorNet, Fox stressed the importance of enhancing intellectual diversity in all fields of academic research and studies.  The act of mentoring, Fox said, is a way in which faculty members can “give back by transmitting what you’ve learned” to a student.  Mentoring provides the ability to build long sustaining relationships between faculty and students.  Fox recognized how mentoring had benefited her own academic and professional career, as well as the career of Muller, who established the MentorNet organization.  Fox’s opening remarks at the event reflects her advocacy for the promotion of science careers for women and members of minority groups – a goal that UCSD is striving to accomplish.

            MentorNet, the E-Mentoring Network for Diversity in Engineering and Science, is a nonprofit organization that works to further the progress of women and other underrepresented persons in scientific and technical fields.  Started in 1998, Muller stated that the organization has matched thousands of mentoring pairs.  She started off the presentation by defining the mentoring relationship in several different ways, including a “sustained relationship over time” and a “two-way learning process.”  Next, Muller highlighted the benefits and outcomes of mentoring for both the protégé and the mentor.  She described the ways that protégés in the past have gained access to networks, received emotional support and a champion for advancement, while mentors themselves have gained the opportunity to develop future colleagues as well as a renewed appreciation and recommitment to their field of work.  Muller also pointed out the crucial factors that need to be addressed in forming a mentor relationship, including looking for congruent values and a need to define what each person hopes to receive from the mentoring relationship.  One of the main aspects of MentorNet which has contributed to the organization’s success is the use of technological advances to execute their one-on-one programs, most notably, the MentorNet’s e-mentoring which takes advantage of e-mail to help sustain long-lasting relationships between the mentor and the protégé.

            Muller notes that MentorNet is absolutely crucial to the social progress and development of the scientific and technical fields of research and academia.  The use of a dynamic, mentoring relationship helps retain talented women and people of color in such fields as engineering and other science fields.  Muller directed the audience’s attention to the recent uproar over the statements made by Larry Summers, president of Harvard University who attempted to explain the greater number of males in high-end science and engineering positions through the stance that men and women have “innate differences.”  Muller points out that this is just a reflection of greater societal misconceptions of women’s academic abilities and that the event presented the perfect opportunity to examine society’s gendered roles as well as the inherent beliefs that drive society’s implicit ideas about women and men in science.

            Mentoring programs such as MentorNet notably become an essential way in which all minorities in the sciences can receive the boosted confidence, ongoing encouragement, academic advice, support and inspiration needed to continue their personal academic aspirations.  It is clear that until full representation is achieved in engineering and science fields, in particular the representation of women and people of color, society is losing out on the great numbers of talented individuals who can contribute to research and educational programs.  Mentoring, then, is not only about individual achievement, but the progress of society as a whole, too.