Graduate Student University of Georgia ATHENS, Georgia
Body of Abstract: Mentoring influences graduate students’ personal and professional development in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields, particularly for students from historically underrepresented groups. While mentorship is thought to lead to a constellation of beneficial outcomes, little is known about how to match mentees and mentors in order to develop effective mentoring relationships. Mentee-mentor similarity represents one positive predictor hypothesized to influence mentorship quality. Similarity between mentees and mentors can include psychological similarity (e.g., shared values, beliefs, attitudes) and surface-level similarity (e.g., shared gender, race/ethnicity) with some forms of similarity being more influential than others. The notion that similarity is prerequisite to forming quality mentoring relationships in STEM graduate education is problematic given the limited diversity of faculty members and increasing diversity of the graduate population. However, mentors who demonstrate cultural diversity awareness in their mentoring relationships may effectively support their mentees. The present study examines the influence of mentee-mentor demographics (e.g., gender, race/ethnicity), psychological similarity, and cultural awareness on the mentoring support and relationship quality in a national sample of 565 doctoral students using structural equation modeling. Our results indicate that mentee-mentor psychological similarity was most strongly associated with mentorship support and relationship quality. Doctoral students’ whose mentors demonstrated greater cultural awareness also reported higher quality relationships. Mentees’ who shared demographics with their mentors reported similar or, in some cases, lower levels of mentorship than peers with demographically dissimilar mentors. Overall, our findings suggest that psychological similarity and cultural awareness, rather than demographic similarity, are associated with greater mentoring support and overall higher relationship quality in doctoral student faculty mentoring relationships. Based on these results, doctoral students should seek out mentors who share their values and perspectives and who are willing to address cultural differences, rather than based on demographic similarity alone.