Mentoring with intention: Strengthening graduate support at ASU

January is National Mentoring Month, a time to celebrate the impact mentoring can have and to reflect honestly on where gaps remain. At Arizona State University, mentoring is recognized as a critical component of graduate student success. 

Graduate faculty invest deeply in their students’ development as scholars and professionals, but for many graduate students, mentoring is inconsistent or informal. This unevenness is not usually the result of a lack of care or commitment on the part of faculty but instead reflects a structural reality of graduate education. Most faculty were never trained to mentor. Many learned how to navigate academia by enduring it themselves, often within mentoring models that emphasized independence over guidance and ambiguity over clarity. 

 

Lisa Anderson, professor in the School of Social Transformation and senior associate dean of academic affairs and engagement in the Graduate College, notes that one of the most challenging legacies of these older models is what she describes as an “independent” mode of mentoring. “It is unfortunate that in some of these cases, students feel so alone and isolated that they just give up and don’t finish their degrees,” Anderson says. “I think this is the worst outcome of all, to have put in time and effort and to not be able to finish. Sometimes, faculty are not sympathetic to the challenges today’s graduate students face, and add to the stress students already feel.”

While graduate education has undergone significant changes, mentoring expectations have expanded without a corresponding investment in preparing faculty for this role.

Faculty members are experts in research, teaching, and their respective disciplines. Without formal training in mentoring, they need to develop skills such as career planning, professional norms, and the emotional and cultural dynamics that shape graduate student experiences. As graduate education has become increasingly complex and diverse, the role of the mentor has evolved accordingly. Without intentional support, faculty are often left to figure out these responsibilities on their own.

Mentoring, however, is not an innate talent. It is a professional skill that can be learned, strengthened, and refined over time. When institutions treat mentoring as a skill rather than an assumption, they create space for clarity, consistency, and shared responsibility.

“When we consider mentoring a skill, it means that anyone can be a good mentor,” Anderson explains. “Having a good mentor is not a matter of luck. And no matter how good we think we are as mentors, there are always skills and practices that we can learn from our colleagues that may help us reach a student we have struggled to mentor.”

 

This understanding has guided the work of the Graduate College Faculty Fellows, who asked a central question as they developed a new approach to faculty mentoring. What would it look like if strong graduate mentoring were not optional or accidental, but intentional and supported across the institution?

The 2025-26 Graduate College Faculty Fellows bring together faculty from across disciplines, including social work, health professions, history, computing and augmented intelligence, biological and health systems engineering, and social transformation.

Together, they are serving as collaborators and co-designers, drawing on research, practice, and lived experience to shape a mentoring framework grounded in the realities of graduate education.

The result of this work is a modular mentoring curriculum designed specifically for graduate faculty. The curriculum includes a set of core modules that establish foundational mentoring practices, along with optional modules that address specific situations and student needs.

Looking ahead, Anderson emphasizes both immediate and long term impact. “I hope that the most immediate impact is that students feel supported as graduate students, in their educational and professional journeys,” she says. “In the long term, I hope that ASU becomes known as a place where students are mentored well, where they not only know their fields, but are building successful lives and careers.”

 

National Mentoring Month offers an opportunity not only to celebrate mentoring relationships but also to recommit to enhancing the mentoring experience in graduate education. Mentoring is most effective when it is collective, evolving, and supported at the institutional level.

The Graduate College welcomes feedback from both faculty and students. Are there mentoring topics that should be included? Are there experiences that could inform future iterations of this work? By continuing to learn together, we can strengthen mentoring practices that support graduate students and faculty across ASU.