Reflections on Teaching and Mentoring

Graduate students at various universities may have the opportunity to participate in a variety of outreach activities which may include teaching or mentoring others. These experiences are generally considered to be beneficial for both the graduate student who is participating in the activity and the population that is being taught or mentored. As they assist others, the graduate student has the opportunity to develop his or her skills as a teacher and a mentor, which are critical skills for someone who wishes to pursue an academic career. Several years ago, the author of this paper participated in a university-sponsored outreach activity as a graduate student at the University of Michigan, in which she spent several hours each week for an entire academic year at a local high school that served a community with a large population of underrepresented minorities. In this program, graduate students partnered with high school teachers, and were a regular presence in one or more of their classes. In the course of the program, they were expected to assist the teacher with science-related and engineering-related activities, help small groups of students who were having difficulties in the class, and serve as role models to the high school students. As part of this program, each graduate student was encouraged to start a blog, and to regularly post updates to their own blog or to a group blog. In this paper, the author will use the techniques of auto-ethnography to analyze the content of her blog, in order to determine what effect these experiences had on her development as a teacher and a mentor. This analysis will be influenced by the passage of time and by later experiences, since the author has since graduated, worked as an adjunct faculty member and in an industrial position, and subsequently began a tenure-track faculty position. The results of this analysis will be of interest to graduate students who have the opportunity to participate in similar outreach programs, as they can consciously work to gain the insights that will help them in later stages of their careers, and to those designing such programs, as they will be able to use this information to explain the value of similar programs to all of those involved in them.