What You Get when You Give: How Graduate Students Benefit from Serving as Mentors.

Abstract

This study utilizes a social exchange framework to analyze the qualitative narratives of 81 graduate student mentors participating in the Intellectual Entrepreneurship Pre-Graduate Internship at The University of Texas at Austin. Findings suggest that in addition to personal benefits, mentorship has four major professional benefits: a deeper perspective both on themselves and their academic discipline; the development of advising and mentoring skills; contributing to the diversity of their academic and professional field by assisting an emerging scholar from an underrepresented population; and knowledge that mentoring can assist both mentees and mentors in reaching their goals. The importance of mentoring has been widely touted in business, education, and psychological research. Also referred to as “developmental relationships ” (Kram, 1988), mentoring can be understood broadly as associations between senior and junior individuals focused on the ju-nior members ’ personal and/or career development and individual growth. These relationships meet two primary needs: career support and socio-emotional support. This broad definition includes long- and short-term relation-ships, as well as mentors who are formally assigned to protégés and relationships that have developed organi-cally and informally. Much of the empirical and anecdotal literature addresses the ways in which protégés or junior members of mentoring relationships benefit from their interactions with mentors (Allen, Poteet, & Burroughs,