About the Program

An important part of the mission of Graduate Division is to improve the quality of the graduate student experience. To this end, the Graduate Division constantly seeks innovations that will support our student body and help us develop our student programs. The Graduate Student Mentoring Program offers curriculum, student, and faculty support that facilitates and transforms the graduate student experience.

Mentors have always played a crucial role in the accomplishments of graduate students, and here at UCR, faculty have embraced that responsibility. This year, we are fortunate to have the resources to create mentoring teams that include both faculty and graduate students. In doing so,  we have begun to create a kind of mentoring relationship that will help our diverse population achieve great successes.

In putting together this UCR mentoring program, we consulted resources and materials from multiple peer institutions. We adapted many aspects of mentoring programs developed by the Rackham School of Graduate Studies, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Washington University, and others. Their themes resonated well with our own campus experience, and we thank them for generously sharing their work. UCR’s graduate students, faculty, and staff were likewise instrumental in adding to our developing project their insights and experience.

Like most program rollouts, ours is experimental and dynamic. From this initial foray into mentoring, we hope to gain the kind of information about mentoring relationships and building a successful program from a ground-zero perspective. The program will change and grow as our project develops and our goals and outcomes become clearer. This program will improve as both mentors and mentees provide us with accounts of triumphs and failures, of challenges and solutions, of ideas and innovations.