Selecting Mentors, contributed by Rick Adrion, University of Massachusetts Amherst
From CISEREUPI
Selecting mentors
Rick Adrion, PI UMass Amherst REU Site
The assignment of mentors is critical for broad-based REU Sites. While the Site-wide activities bring students together, the majority of their time is spent within their assigned research groups.
The UMass Amherst mentoring process begins well before the deadline for applications. We solicit commitments from the faculty to take on REU students for the summer. A faculty member willing to sponsor a REU must agree to identify a graduate student who will be assigned as the REU student's mentor and the faculty member must be willing to commit to being available for a significant portion of the 10-week REU period. The faculty member also supplies a set of possible REU projects that we include on the Site webpage. These commitments are required for assigned Site REU students and for supplement REU, DREU, etc. students that a faculty member wants to be included in the SIte program.
As the applications arrive, we assign them to faculty for review based on the applicants' stated interests on their applications. The PI and project manager then determine acceptances based on a number of criteria, among these is a determination of how well an applicant might match with the faculty and graduate student mentors, the potential projects and the research group. Matching is based on prior experience with faculty and graduate students as mentors. Our department has a strong commitment to UG research and most labs have UG students working in them. This and prior REU projects allows the PI and project manager to assess the skills and commitment of the faculty and graduate students as mentors. We are careful to see that the proposed project for the REU student is research, not (only) programming.
All of the faculty and graduate student mentors are invited to a weekly lunch meeting with all of the REU students. We carefully monitor attendance and the mentors' participation in the progress report presentations we require of the REU students. The project manager makes herself available to students (as does the PI, but less successfully) who may have personal or other issues. This has allowed us to intervene when mentor-mentee relations so awry.
