Peer Mentorship

About

Peer mentorship relationships, such as when advanced graduate students serve as peer mentors to early-career graduate students, can benefit from similar tools and structures as those which are effective in faculty mentoring relationships. These peer-to-peer mentoring relationships tend to have an even greater focus on program and institutional navigation and resource-sharing.

Peer Mentorship Tools

The following resources can be used by peer mentors to help build connections, structure, and alignment. 

Things to do with your Peer Mentee

This (non-comprehensive) list of ideas is intended to support peer mentors to understand the variety of structured support they can provide for mentees, such as sharing drafts of works-in-progress for mutual feedback, and inviting mentees to academic talks and professional development workshops.

Conversation Starters for Peer Mentors

This document provides peer mentors with a starter pack of question prompts that can support conversations at regular check-in meetings to be engaging, effective, and mutually interesting. Many of these questions are based on research related to how mentoring relationships can strategically support mentees’ sense of belonging.

Sample Peer Mentorship Agreement Template

Just as mentors and mentees in other settings find it useful to collaboratively develop a practical mentorship agreement, so too do members of a peer mentoring relationship. This simplified Peer Mentoring Agreement Template can provide the structure and set of topics for a mutual discussion about aligning expectations.