We encourage participants to reimagine mentoring as a set of skills that develop through practice and reflection, rather than as an innate ability that some people simply have and others do not. These skills can be learned, practiced, and refined over time. Like teaching or research, mentoring improves through reflection, feedback, and opportunities to learn from others.
Mentorship Networks
Mentoring works best when it is understood as a network rather than a singular one-to-one arrangement. Academic career paths at all stages require many kinds of support over time, and relying on a single mentor can create unnecessary pressure and unmet expectations. A network model invites more intentional questions: What kind of support is needed right now, and who is well-positioned to offer it? This allows mentoring relationships, including assigned ones, to be valuable without being expected to solve everything. At the bottom of this section, you will find example resources to grow your network at Berkeley.
Developing this skill looks like using simple tools to help mentors and mentees name the kinds of support the mentee needs, clarify what one mentor can realistically offer, and identify where additional connections may be needed.
Example Tool: Mentorship Network Map
A mentorship network map is a simple way to make support visible. It prompts you to name the categories of support you rely on, such as research, teaching and service, career development, well-being, and other forms of support, and then identify the people you turn to for support in each category. Mentors can use this map with mentees to normalize the practice of seeking multiple mentors, clarify their own role, and identify areas where additional support may be helpful.
Grow your network and Berkeley
Networks change over time, and here at Berkeley, there are many spaces and programs across campus designed to help you get mentorship specific to your needs. Below are a few examples of opportunities to meet and cultivate mentorship relationships, separated for students, postdocs, and faculty.
Faculty
Postdoctoral Scholars
Graduate Students
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Berkeley Discovery Hubs (also for undergrads)
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Beyond Academia (also for postdocs)
Undergraduate Students
Mentoring with Structure
Misaligned expectations are one of the most common reasons mentoring relationships experience conflict, even when both mentor and mentee have good intentions. When expectations are implicit, mentees are left guessing how to prepare, how often to reach out, what kind of feedback is “normal,” and what success looks like. Making expectations explicit creates a shared reference point. This directly reduces the “hidden curriculum” problem, in which some mentees are advantaged simply because they already know unspoken norms or feel more comfortable asking, while also holding both mentors and mentees accountable to each other.
Developing this skill looks like making explicit expectations about meetings, communication, feedback, milestones, accountability, and resources visible enough that both mentors and mentees can revisit them over time.
Mentoring like a Coach
Mentoring often involves situations where advice alone is not enough. Some questions have a clear answer, such as a policy, procedure, or deadline, but many mentoring conversations involve uncertainty, competing values, or multiple possible paths. Coaching flips the conversation on its head: instead of the mentor having all the answers, the mentor mostly only has questions. Coaching asks the mentor to separate their preferences and experiences from those of the mentee and centers the mentee’s agency by helping them identify what they need and what matters to them.
Developing this skill looks like pausing before giving advice and using curious, values-centered questions to help a mentee name their goal, understand their current reality, surface options, and choose a next step.
Mentoring with Care
Mentoring with care means seeing and supporting mentees as whole, complex people while also doing the same for yourself as a mentor. Without care, mentoring can become overly procedural, unavailable, or disconnected from the lived realities that shape academic work. But care without boundaries can also become unsustainable, leading mentors to overextend themselves or mentees to rely too heavily on a single person. Effective care balances empathy, accountability, and realistic limits so that support remains meaningful without becoming overwhelming.
Developing this skill looks like practicing emotionally engaged curiosity while setting clear boundaries around availability, responsibility, and accountability, so that support remains engaging yet sustainable.