SRE Mentoring and Goal Setting Guidelines and Timeline

Building Your SRE Mentoring Team

• Welcome to SRE. We encourage all SRE faculty to build their own mentoring teams during the first year that they are on campus. The overall purpose of the mentoring team is to help you establish contacts and find potential collaborators at OSU; provide feedback on setting SRE goals for research, teaching, and other scholarly activities; navigate SRE and the broader OSU campus, community and resources; and in general provide sound advice on how best to achieve your own scholarly ambitions and meet the expectations of being an OSU faculty member and a joint departmental/SRE hire. A good mentoring team is essential to help you in achieving a high level of synergy between SRE and your department, and to provide you with a supportive and collaborative network of faculty that can be a bridge from your department to other units and disciplines.
• An additional role of SRE mentors is to provide input into the annual review of SRE faculty. The SRE faculty director provides the department chair with an annual summary and assessment of each SRE faculty member’s contributions to SRE and progress towards their SRE goals over the past year. Given the breadth and multi-disciplinary scope of SRE, it is necessary to seek additional input from faculty members who are familiar with the specific disciplinary and interdisciplinary achievements. This is not intended to be an onerous process for mentors. They should view this as an opportunity to support their mentee by helping to meaningfully articulate their achievements and contributions.
• We suggest a mentoring team comprised of 3-4 faculty: at least one from your same department, at least one from outside your department and ideally at least one of whom is an SRE-affiliated faculty. We encourage you to seek advice from your department chair, colleagues, SRE faculty director Elena Irwin (irwin.78), and others in identifying potential mentors. Melissa Amos (amos.126) curates the list of SRE affiliated faculty and is also happy to help in identifying potential people.
• Once you’ve identified a potential candidate, be sure to meet individually and get to know him or her first before making an official ask. It’s important that you feel comfortable with your mentor, and that there is some connection between the two of you. It’s also important that the person understand SRE’s expectations of mentors. We have a document that provides guidance for mentors regarding their role (“Guidance for SRE Mentors”). Feel free to share this.
• If your department already has a mentorship program established, then SRE encourages blending the two. This will ease your burden in terms of coordination and also will provide opportunities for communication among all your mentors.
• Once you have identified your mentoring team, please email Melissa Amos (amos.126) the following information for each of your mentors: name, position, unit affiliation, email, areas of expertise, and expected role (e.g. research collaborator, co-instructor, overall mentor). We encourage you to include a copy of this email to your department chair so that they are in the loop. We will share the mentor guidelines and confirm with each mentor that they are willing to serve in this capacity. We will also confirm the team with your department chair.
• SRE is happy to schedule an annual meeting with your mentoring team, if that is helpful. Please work with Melissa to get these set up when you are ready. But don’t limit your contact to your mentors to just once a year! We encourage you to initiate additional group or one-on-one meetings to make the most of your mentoring team while also respecting their many commitments and using their time judiciously. They will have a lot to offer, so don’t be shy!

  September 2017

   

  Guidance for SRE Mentors

  Thank you for considering being a mentor to a new SRE faculty member. This is a great way to provide support and guidance to a new faculty while also providing a broader service to SRE. Following are a few guidelines intended to clarify the mentor role. The commitment to be an SRE mentor is a meaningful one, and we hope that you will make a purposeful decision. If you have any questions regarding this commitment, please feel free to reach out to SRE faculty director Elena Irwin.78 or SRE program coordinator Melissa Amos.126 at any time.

• SRE Discovery Themes faculty are jointly hired by their own department and SRE and are expected to participate in a variety of scholarly activities that contribute to the success of SRE. To support them, SRE encourages all SRE faculty to build their own mentoring teams during their first year. An effective mentoring team is essential to help faculty members achieve a high level of synergy between SRE and their department and to achieve a level of effort that is consistent with all OSU faculty members.
• As an SRE mentor, we ask that you judiciously give your time and support by providing sound, thoughtful advice to your mentee regarding how he or she can best achieve his or her own scholarly ambitions and also meet the expectations of being an OSU faculty member and a joint departmental/SRE hire. We also encourage SRE faculty to seek assistance from their mentoring teams in establishing contacts, finding potential collaborators, navigating SRE and the OSU campus, community and resources, and providing feedback to them in setting their SRE goals for research, teaching, and other scholarly activities. These goals are intended to help faculty satisfy their expected SRE contribution by developing disciplinary expertise in topics related to sustainability or resilience and engaging in interdisciplinary activities (for more on SRE goals, see the full set of goal setting guidelines for SRE faculty).
• An additional role of SRE mentors is to provide input into the annual review of SRE faculty. The SRE faculty director provides the department chair with an annual summary and assessment of each SRE faculty member’s contributions to SRE and progress towards his or her SRE goals over the past year. Given the breadth and multi-disciplinary scope of SRE, it is necessary to seek additional input from faculty who are familiar with the specific disciplinary and interdisciplinary achievements. Towards this end, you will receive an email in January/February of each year with a link to a brief survey with several open-ended questions. This should not take much of your time, but will depend on you having some familiarity with the faculty member’s scholarly work. We hope that you will view it as an opportunity to meaningfully articulate your mentee’s achievements and contributions. The kind of feedback we will be seeking is open-ended, e.g., along the lines of: Based on your own knowledge, what are the ways in which this person is contributing to the overall mission of SRE? In your view, what are the most substantial contributions that this person has made to SRE over the past year? Are this person’s SRE goals appropriate for supporting his or her future intellectual growth as a faculty member in department X and as a part of SRE?
• If the mentee’s department already has a mentorship program established, then SRE encourages blending the two. This eases coordination and provides opportunities for communication among all mentors.
• The commitment to be a mentor is open-ended and may continue as long as the mentee and mentor both agree the relationship is providing value and working well.
• SRE assists in scheduling an annual meeting for mentees and their mentoring team. We also encourage mentees to reach out directly to arrange additional group or one-on-one meetings, and to use their mentors in ways that will bring the most value to them while also respecting their time and many commitments. SRE provides occasional opportunities for other networking throughout the year, and will let you know about these as they arise.

  September 2017

   

  • SRE Discovery Themes (DT) faculty are expected to participate in a variety of scholarly activities that contribute to the overall success of SRE. As articulated in the Letter of Offer, SRE faculty should define measurable goals for guiding and evaluating their contributions via a consultative process with the SRE faculty director and the chair of the faculty member’s department. These goals should be developed in concert with departmental expectations for faculty performance, as specified in the department’s promotion and tenure document, and in accordance with these SRE goal setting guidelines. The ultimate purpose is to achieve a high level of synergy between SRE and the department by providing a supportive and collaborative environment for success with a level of individual effort that is consistent with all OSU faculty members.

  • Goals are intended to support faculty in satisfying their expected SRE contribution by developing disciplinary expertise in topics related to sustainability or resilience and engaging in interdisciplinary activities that build on this disciplinary expertise. For this purpose, interdisciplinary activities are collaborative scholarly activities (e.g., publishing, grant proposal writing, teaching) with scholars from other disciplines or scholarly activities that engage a broader interdisciplinary audience, including publishing in outlets not typically associated with the faculty member’s discipline or teaching students from other disciplines. The appropriate set of goals depends on the individual faculty and is determined in consultation with the SRE faculty director and department chair. Goals should be identified with an SRE knowledge domain and broadly applicable to one or more SRE research theme (see SRE overview figure).

  • Goal setting is an ongoing process and it is expected that goals will evolve over time. Goals should be established by the end of the first year of a faculty member’s appointment and updated annually. Goals will be reviewed by the SRE faculty director and department chair on an annual basis. An annual assessment by the SRE faculty director will be provided to the department chair and SRE faculty. SRE faculty are expected to provide evidence of progress towards goals in their annual departmental report that is shared with SRE.

  • Not all goals have to be met to satisfy the expected contribution to SRE. We encourage faculty to set some aspirational goals. Trajectory goals are longer term and may be broken down into intermediate, shorter-term (annual) goals. Other annual goals may be stand alone. We suggest 3-5 goals with a mix of annual and trajectory (see the SRE goal setting worksheet).

  • Disciplinary-based research that is relevant to sustainability science or resilience is a necessary goal. Disciplinary publications on sustainability or resilience that establish the faculty members as an expert in their field are expected and recognized as an SRE contribution. It is acceptable that this work be sole-authored.

  • Goals that focus on interdisciplinary scholarly activities beyond the faculty member’s primary discipline are needed to provide a sufficient contribution to SRE. At least one of these goals should seek to develop interdisciplinary research collaborations. Other goals may include teaching and learning, outreach to broader audiences, and service to SRE that builds the university community, including campus stewardship and activities related to the university’s sustainability goals.

  • A sustained effort by the faculty member is expected to develop interdisciplinary collaborations. SRE cannot presage the specific nature of the collaboration and understands that this realistically cannot be promised in advance. What is crucial is that the faculty member outline goals towards this end and pursue opportunities to influence and be influenced by colleagues in other fields, thereby becoming an active participant and contributor to the SRE community.