Relate + Accompany

Connect over deep characteristics.

She showed a deep, genuine interest in me as a person.

Jane + Brent

Jane has been a scientist and a professor at Arizona State for more than 40 years. She has won NSF grants, received prestigious fellowships, and published books and articles. She has one of those CVs that is a monograph all in itself. 

Beyond grants and publications, however, there are two things Jane communicates about herself. First, that while she is an accomplished scientist and Congressional Fellow now, she started out as a young woman from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the daughter of the local Girl Scout troop leader and a nuclear physicist.  

Second, that among her accomplishments is her track record of mentoring. She is as proud of that record as anything else on her resume, including efforts to help students write theses or dissertations, access significant learning opportunities, and take the lead in developing a new major at ASU, Biology and Society.

Just don’t call the people she works with mentees. 

Jane doesn’t like the word “mentee.” The biologist in her wants to very clearly and particularly name the specific species she is studying and talking about, even if it takes the more cumbersome term, “person being mentored.” The way the marine biologist in her would distinguish the European eel and the Snyder Moray eel.  

Jane calls mentoring a dyad, a relationship between two people where both put something in, and both partners learn something. It is a symbiotic relationship. For Jane, the people she mentors are active participants, helping to set the course for their shared work together. Mentoring is about working with each student to draw a map to that future person, and not just to complete a task.

Jane asks, “Who do you want to be? Not what you want to be.” 

Brent was a promising student from a small town in rural Northern Arizona when he entered ASU in the 1990s. He had won one of 20 scholarships to attend a flagship university.

He was primed to connect with Jane in several ways, he remembers: First, his scholarship program promised connection to a mentor. He was “wired” to look for an adult to support and guide him during this time. While his assigned person was not Jane, Brent said the program’s promise made him predisposed to be on the lookout for someone like Jane.

Second, Jane’s new major, Biology and Society, crossed departmental and disciplinary boundaries. Any opportunity that broke down traditional academic categories in the sciences caught Brent’s attention.

Third, but not known to Brent initially, he was about to connect with a mentor who, like him, was from a small town, but who had dreams of bigger things.

Brent took two courses Jane taught. Afterwards, Jane invited Brent to be one of a handful of undergraduates on Jane’s research team. She was a Congressional Science Fellow at that time, and Brent said she was a “ferocious advocate” for students, particularly undergraduate students, in getting them access to high-level experiences in science policy. She was unique in making undergraduates feel welcomed, respected, and valued in places where they might not normally be included.

The opportunity was a challenge. The students met with the heads of major nonprofits or Members of Congress, briefing these senior researchers, philanthropists, and policymakers on recent developments in K-12 science education. The stakes and expectations were high, but Jane prepared them thoroughly, Brent remembered. Far from being intimidated, Brent said these were some of the most authentic learning opportunities he ever had.

“I approach conversations and carry myself with a different level of confidence that I can—to this day—bring back to the sorts of conversations that Jane was putting us in,” he said. 

Brent recalls it was Jane’s curiosity that set her apart from other professors and potential mentors on campus. She was a very open, inquisitive person, and wanting to understand students allowed her to more effectively connect them with people, resources, and experiences that might benefit them. 

Jane remembered that after the fellowship, her job was not just to help Brent write a thesis, but to collaborate with Brent on setting a course for his life. They were, in a sense, collaborating to figure out “how to honor and embrace his roots in Show Low, Arizona, when you also have aspirations for Harvard.”

Jane balances these things—the embracing of roots and the setting of bigger goals, the bigger picture and the immediate task— by believing in each person, then helping them define and reach their goals, not hers. On the task, she creates ways that people being mentored can achieve and measure success, particularly with quick wins, so that she can help people being mentored stay on track. Mentors “structure a process for accomplishments” that helps students to lay out goals and milestones. These different support structures also benefit Jane. Doing that for students “opens me up to ways to work together to figure out” how to help more and more students.

In connecting with different people, Jane takes inspiration from her mother. When Jane grew up in East Tennessee, her mother led one of the few racially integrated Scout troops in that area in the 1960s. She watched her mother mentor young women, both Black and white. Her mother made all of her troop members feel included, no matter where they were from. Her mother learned from the scouts, and their relationships evolved over time. 

When she came to mentor at ASU, Jane from East Tennessee sat and listened to the kid from rural Arizona to plan together how they might build on his roots, not reject them.

Brent remembered that the differences in their ages or genders was not as important to him as having a mentor who understood what it was like to be from a small town and want to do big things. “I was a kid from rural Northern Arizona,” and Jane “showed a deep, genuine interest in me as a person.” Jane understood Brent’s strengths, and had a sense for where he might struggle. Because she both knew and believed in him, Jane could help Brent believe he could go to these places—Teach for America, Harvard, and eventually leadership positions at several organizations— and not leave himself and roots behind. For her part, Jane says she doesn’t focus on identity so much as trying to make each individual feel a part of the group, as her mother might have done in that Tennessee Girl Scout Troop. 

In formal programs, like the one that brought Brent to the university, there is often great attention brought to the idea of match quality, or how programs bring mentors and mentees together. Demographic factors like gender are often one of those criteria. But studies of mentoring programs have shown that the factors that predict a good mentoring match are “deep-level similarity¹.” Factors like outlooks, values, and beliefs can be much more influential than factors like race or gender alone². Connecting over traits like having similar goals in the sciences or both being from a small town can make or strengthen a mentorship bond. Brent and Jane both coming from small towns, combined with Jane’s efforts to get to know her mentees, created a powerful developmental experience for Brent.

Once mentors and mentees are matched, then what?

Academic studies of mentoring can, at times, divide mentoring into artificial distinctions. One of these is differentiating between developmental mentoring—which is focused on friendship and support—and prescriptive mentoring—which is trying to help mentees improve in some way³.

But in a meta-analysis of 173 studies of mentorships by Lillian Eby and several colleagues⁴, researchers found that the combination of instrumental support and the developmental support were together associated with relationship quality. Other studies have shown that mentees value environments of acceptance and trust and mentors sharing their knowledge, and mentors and mentees both appreciate getting to share some responsibility for the learning agenda⁵.

That is, in a sense, mentoring for Jane: walking beside students, offering them support for their tasks, listening to their stories and goals in the service of helping them become the people they want to be.

1. de Janasz, S. C., & Godshalk, V. M. (2013). The role of e-mentoring in protégés’ learning and satisfaction. Group & Organization Management, 38(6), pp. 743–774.

2. Ensher, E. A., Grant-Vallone, E. J., & Marelich, W. D. (2002). Effects of perceived attitudinal and demographic similarity on protégés’ support and satisfaction gained from their mentoring relationships. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 32(7), pp. 1407–1430.

3.  Morrow, K. V., & Styles, M. B. (1995). Building relationships with youth in program settings: A study of Big Brothers/Big Sisters. Philadelphia: Public/Private Ventures.

4. Eby, L. T. D. T., Allen, T. D., Hoffman, B. J., Baranik, L. E., Sauer, J. B., Baldwin, S., ... & Evans, S. C. (2013). An interdisciplinary meta-analysis of the potential antecedents, correlates, and consequences of protégé perceptions of mentoring. Psychological bulletin, 139(2), 441.

5. Hamlin, R. G., & Sage, L. (2011). Behavioural criteria of perceived mentoring effectiveness: An empirical study of effective and ineffective mentor and mentee behaviour within formal mentoring relationships. Journal of European Industrial Training, 35(8), 752-778.