Mentoring Reimagined Philosophy

Mentoring is fundamentally a relationship of support between people, and the core practices of good mentoring apply across roles and career stages. Whether working with undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs, or faculty peers, effective mentoring draws on shared principles that evolve. We emphasize that everyone participates in mentoring both as a mentor and as a mentee throughout their academic career.

We begin from the assumption that mentees do not come with deficits to be fixed. They bring knowledge, skills, perspectives, and experiences that can be cultivated and supported. Rather than positioning mentoring as remediation, effective mentoring recognizes and builds on these existing strengths to make complex structures and processes transparent.

Academic work generates a wide range of mentoring needs that evolve and change over time, including professional development, substantive feedback, access to opportunities, and emotional support. No single mentor can meet all of these complex needs, and no mentee can get all of their needs met by one person. We emphasize networked mentoring, where individuals draw on multiple mentors. This approach reduces strain on any one relationship, allowing good mentoring to be sustainable over time. Networked support also expands access to diverse perspectives and forms of support. These can be informal but intentional and impactful support channels.

Mentoring is not an innate ability that some people simply “have.” It is a set of skills that can be learned, practiced, and refined over time. Like teaching or research, mentoring improves through reflection, feedback, and opportunities to learn from others.

While core mentoring practices apply broadly, the way mentoring is applied in daily work is context-specific. Expectations, structures, and challenges differ across disciplines, units, and career stages. For this reason, our approach centers mentoring work at the level of the unit (schools, colleges, departments, divisions, and programs) where norms and practices are shaped.

We typically work with graduate students and faculty in separate sessions so that participants can engage with shared experiences, roles, and expectations. This structure supports the development of shared language and helps create the trust and openness needed for the vulnerability that growth requires.

Good mentoring is strengthened when institutions help to make mentoring visible and invest in mentoring through training, conversations, resources, clear expectations, and rewarding strong mentoring. We view mentoring as a system that spans individual relationships, departmental practices, and campus-wide culture and that improves when these levels are aligned.

At UC Berkeley, mentoring is formally recognized in the Academic Personnel Manual as part of promotion and tenure review for faculty, both in teaching and in service. Our campus culture around mentoring needs to be responsive to the policy by adequately supporting and recognizing those who invest in mentoring. Creating space to learn about mentoring, reflect on practice, and talk openly about challenges is an essential part of that shift.

By supporting mentoring practices at the individual, departmental, and campus levels, Mentoring Reimagined aims to make mentoring more consistent, transparent, and sustainable. Over time, this approach contributes to academic communities in which people feel valued, connected, and supported in their work, and where mentoring is recognized as essential to strong research, teaching, and long-term retention.