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= Premium Content Log In | Create a Free Account | Subscribe Now Wednesday, November 25, 2009 Subscribe Today! Home News Opinion & Ideas Facts & Figures Topics Jobs Advice Forums $('#navbarbtnForums').attr("href", "/forums/"); Events Faculty Administration Technology Community Colleges International Special Reports People The Ticker Current Issue Faculty Home News Faculty function check() { if (document.getElementById("searchInput").value == '' ) { alert('Please enter search terms'); return false; } else return true; } $().ready(function() { $('#email-popup').jqm({trigger: 'a.show-email', modal: 'true'}); $('#share-popup').jqm({trigger: 'a.show-share', modal: 'true'}); }); E-mail function printPage() { window.print(); } $(document).ready(function(){ $('.print-btn').click(printPage); }); Print Share August 1, 2003 The Catalytic Mentor By PIPER FOGG An award-winning chemist at Rutgers U. takes students under her wingHere on the main campus of Rutgers University, Martha Greenblatt often passes buildings that were once part of Camp Kilmer, a military base that received European refugees in the 1950s. An internationally known chemist, the Rutgers professor remembers the camp from her days as a teenager from Hungary, alone and unsure of what lay ahead. Now her lab is filled with smart young graduate students from China, Russia, Turkey, and the United States. Over the years, she has had 27 graduate students and 25 postdoctoral students in her lab. Because of her own personal and professional experiences, she understands what they are going through, and she goes out of her way to guide them. That means pushing them in their research, encouraging them to make outside contacts, even coaching some in English, all to develop in them the skills to become independent thinkers and successful scientists. In the spring, Ms. Greenblatt, 62, received the Francis P. Garvan-John M. Olin Medal, given annually in recognition of significant achievements by a female chemist in America. The American Chemical Society honored her as "a leading solid-state chemist and scholar, teacher, science advocate, and outstanding role model." The award is particularly satisfying to her because it celebrates her serving as a mentor to young scientists. In addition, the university has made her a Board of Governors professor, the highest rank a Rutgers faculty member can hold. In any field, a great mentor can make a big difference. But, in the sciences, such a figure can mean the difference between a lackluster dissertation and a mediocre job offer, on the one hand, and a publication that is a catalys

In any field, a great mentor can make a big difference. But, in the sciences, such a figure can mean the difference between a lackluster dissertation and a mediocre job offer, on the one hand, and a publication that is a catalyst for a promising career in academe or industry, on the other. An effective mentor acts as an advocate, a role model, and a guide to academic and professional development.

Mentor in a Manual: Climbing the Academic Ladder to Tenure

Ms. Mentor's Impeccable Advice for Women in Academia

Ms. Mentor on its online Career Network

Take, for example, the concept of apprenticeship, to which the Carnegie researchers devote an entire chapter. The faculty-master and student-apprentice relationship as the signature pedagogical structure of doctoral education dates back to the university's medieval roots. But, the Carnegie authors say, it's time that model was updated.

The study recommends that doctoral programs adopt new structures that allow students to have several intellectual mentors and come to think of mentorship as less an accident of interpersonal chemistry and as more a set of techniques that can be learned, assessed, and rewarded.

Arizona State University that awards an annual $5,000 cash prize to an "outstanding doctoral mentor" or another at the mathematics department of the University of Southern California that places new graduate students in "mentoring triplets" with both a faculty mentor and a more experienced graduate student.

To hear others tell it, an "old boys' club" ran universities and the academic professions well into the 1970s, and if you were lucky enough to win admission into the club, you got the mentoring -- or more precisely, the patron-client relationship -- at the heart of the master-apprentice model

Today, talk about mentoring is ubiquitous in virtually every field, and at all levels of education