ACS Book Highlights Cottrell Scholars’ Effort to Improve Mentoring
Two Cottrell Scholars have co-edited a new American Chemical Society Symposium Series book stemming from a Cottrell Scholars Collaborative effort to improve career and professional mentoring of students in the physical sciences.
The book, Professional Mentoring Programs for Science Students: Career Mentoring for Students in the Physical Sciences, published by the American Chemical Society, is co-edited by CS 2009 Penny Beuning, chemistry, Northeastern University, and CS 2005 Adam Urbach, chemistry, Trinity University. It can be downloaded free of cost.
The book is a resource for institutions and faculty looking to create programs to help their students, who may lack access to high-quality career and professional mentoring. It includes a primer on developing administrative action plans for career programming, with other chapters detailing the motivations, activities, and outcomes of successful career development programs. It also includes information for faculty to use in starting their own programs to help students find their way.
The book is based on information developed for a series of workshops that sprang out of a Cottrell Scholars Collaborative project Research Corporation for Science Advancement funded in 2017. That project, Training Faculty to Assist Students in Career Planning, was headed by Urbach and included Beuning, CS 2017 Shane Ardo, chemistry, University of California, Irvine, CS 2017 Rob Berger, chemistry, Western Washington University, CS 2014 Andriy Nevidomskyy, physics, Rice University, and CS 2017 Yan Xia, chemistry, Stanford University.
Working together, they planned a series of workshops called “COMPASS: Career and Occupational Mentoring for the Professional Advancement of Science Students,” designed to empower the teams of participants to create and launch action plans addressing specific needs identified at their home institutions.
The COMPASS program held an in-person workshop in 2019, with two subsequent workshops held entirely online. Selected programs developed from COMPASS were presented in a symposium at the Spring 2023 ACS National Meeting. Some of these and others are presented in the book, highlighting the wide variety of effective programs as well as the range of institutions in which they were implemented.
The book’s first chapter, COMPASS: Career and Occupational Mentoring for the Professional Advancement of Science Students, is written by Berger, Beuning, Nevidomskyy, and Urbach, and gives details of the program’s development.
Other Cottrell Scholars who participated in the workshops also contributed to the book.
Berger and CS 2021 Jeanine F. Amacher, chemistry, wrote a chapter, Implementation of Professional Development Initiatives in Chemistry at a Regional Public University, summarizing recent efforts to expand and strengthen career mentoring activities in the Chemistry Department at Western Washington University. CS 2009 Rory Waterman, chemistry, cowrote a chapter on mentoring activities at the University of Vermont. Beuning is among the authors of two chapters, The New England Future Faculty Workshop: Paving the Way for Increased Representation in the STEM Professoriate, and NERM 2023 Symposium: Advancing Inclusive Communities through Collaboration.
This book is the latest example of Cottrell Scholars working together across disciplines to create positive change at institutions across the United States and Canada.
“The COMPASS program arose directly from the 2017 Cottrell Scholar Conference,” Buening and Urbach said. “Inspired by the central topic of that conference, the project has been driven by a group of Cottrell Scholars working toward the common goal of improving mentoring in the science community.”
