Using Personality Assessments to Tailor Graduate Student Mentoring

In this (long awaited) episode of Mentoring Matters we discuss how to get our students started off strong at the beginning of the semester. Things we discussed include:

• How much Steph loves to plan
• Setting goals and milestones for your students AND helping them understand your purpose behind the plan

Enjoy!

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You can also join the conversation on our LinkedIn group page The Graduate Mentoring Blueprint

Dr. Jodi McGill (Assistant Dean of Research and Graduate Students at Iowa State University's College of Veterinary Medicine) joined us to discuss what we learned in our last grad faculty book club. We read the book "Wellbeing at Work" by Jim Clifton and Jim Harter, which is from Gallup and CliftonStrengths-based. The book focuses on 5 pillars of wellbeing, a topic we've been very interested in lately.
Some takeaways from this episode:

• Faculty need to thrive themselves before they can help students thrive
• Encouraging grad students to be comfortable enough to share their struggles
• Everyone is different, and there are aspects that support wellbeing that may look different between students
• How important it is to model work/life balance and the value we as faculty place on wellbeing

If you are enjoying this podcast please leave a rating or review, and join us over on Twitter to let us know what topics you'd like to hear more about.
You can also join the conversation on our LinkedIn group page The Graduate Mentoring Blueprint

Time management can be a struggle for graduate students and faculty. In this episode we offer tips to make more efficient use of your time, with the goal of reducing everyone's stress.
We discussed:

• Scheduling "the big rocks" (e.g. the important, big items) first and putting the "sand" around them (e.g. the smaller, urgent things)
• Understanding how much stuff you can really put on your plate, and ways to say "No"
• Calendar management tips
• Being realistic with when you work the best and why this might be different for you and your students
• The necessity of reflection to find what's working and what's not
• Not losing sight of the important/mission serving pieces when the fires (e.g. emails) are such an easy distraction
• Being intentional with how we spend our time

Join us in our LinkedIn Group for more conversation!
 The Graduate Mentorship Blueprint: a faculty forum

If you are enjoying this podcast please leave a rating or review, and join us over on Twitter to let us know what topics you'd like to hear more about.
You can also join the conversation on our LinkedIn group page The Graduate Mentoring Blueprint

In this episode we take you on a behind the scenes journey to hear about our graduate student interactions over a random week.

Things we discussed:

• Being intentional with our time
• Planning ahead to reduce the student's stress (and ours!!)
• Helping students prepare for job interviews
• Preparing for student presentations
• And that pesky fact that we do these mentoring things in addition to the rest of our faculty responsibilities!
• It takes constant contact to build a strong relationship with our students, which allows for deeper, more meaningful communication.

We hope you found this snapshot of our weeks useful as you consider your own mentoring strategies.

If you are enjoying this podcast please leave a rating or review, and join us over on Twitter to let us know what topics you'd like to hear more about.
You can also join the conversation on our LinkedIn group page The Graduate Mentoring Blueprint

In this episode we share ideas for improving resiliency in our graduate students. Topics covered include:

• Angela Duckworth's book "Grit" and Liz Wiseman's "Impact Players" are two resources we discuss and recommend
• Passion is a part of resiliency, we discuss ways to foster passion in our students
• Deliberate practice: we suggest ways to pressure test our students to build those skills they need later in the defense, etc.
• We discuss how we identify the impact players on our teams and how we help develop others into impact players (ex. helping them maintaining ownership of a situation when it gets tough)
• Balancing building resiliency without causing damage to a student's confidence (and how personality/strengths assessments can help)

If you are enjoying this podcast please leave a rating or review, and join us over on Twitter to let us know what topics you'd like to hear more about.
You can also join the conversation on our LinkedIn group page The Graduate Mentoring Blueprint

In this episode we discuss how we've used book clubs with our graduate students to enhance community and habit building.

• Mary talks about reading The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey and Steph talks about reading Atomic Habits by James Clear.
• We discuss what worked, what we'd do differently next time, and what the students thought of it (because Mary did a survey!)

Other topics include thinking about mentoring strategies with a big ROI and the importance of relationships. Plus we really want to encourage you to go listen to our Team Culture episode! It is so important!

If you are enjoying this podcast please leave a rating or review, and join us over on Twitter to let us know what topics you'd like to hear more about.
You can also join the conversation on our LinkedIn group page The Graduate Mentoring Blueprint

In this episode: Steph and Mary are on vacation! And nerding out about how we use the Clifton Strengths talent assessment in our graduate student mentoring. Similar to how we use Meyers Briggs Type Indicator, Strengths is another way to help us tailor the mentoring experience to get the most out of every student (in the least stressful way!) 
We discussed: 

• What Clifton Strengths is (and what it isn't)
• How using Clifton Strengths has increased our self-awareness, helping us understand ourselves better, so we can be more strategic about how we find energy.
• Insights we've gained from using Strengths with our students for a little over a year now.
• Using Strengths as a common vocabulary to have difficult conversations with our students about topics such as wellbeing.
• So much more! This is a good one, folks.

Steph is in the final stages of becoming a Certified Clifton Strengths Coach.
Learn more about Clifton Strengths here.

If you are enjoying this podcast please leave a rating or review, and join us over on Twitter to let us know what topics you'd like to hear more about.
You can also join the conversation on our LinkedIn group page The Graduate Mentoring Blueprint

In this episode we discuss what a powerful tool recognition of individual and team success can be, including:

• Why it's important to ask your team members how they want to be recognized.
• Reinforcing the idea that your team is not necessarily just like you!
• Mary and Steph are super different in how they want to be recognized! (Shocking no one that knows us IRL).
• Novices grow more in response to positive praise-how do we balance the critiques we give them with specific and meaningful praise to support their growth?
  • We mentioned Mellody Hobson's interview with Adam Grant on his podcast

If you are enjoying this podcast please leave a rating or review, and join us over on Twitter to let us know what topics you'd like to hear more about.
You can also join the conversation on our LinkedIn group page The Graduate Mentoring Blueprint

In this episode we discuss how reflection helps our graduate students learn and grow. We talk about some of the strategies we are already using to cause students to pause and reflect and ways we want to try in the future.

What- Recapping the experience
So what- Why does it matter?
Now what- What's next? What do we do differently next time?

We also decided this was just one more example of using powerful questions in our graduate student mentoring. Prior episodes that might be useful here: Quit bossing, start coaching and Phrases to use in your grad mentoring

If you are enjoying this podcast please leave a rating or review, and join us over on Twitter to let us know what topics you'd like to hear more about.
You can also join the conversation on our LinkedIn group page The Graduate Mentoring Blueprint

Attending conferences can be a great way to entice a student to finish a project and share their data. But how do we help students get the most out of an often very expensive conference attendance?

In this episode we reminisce about some of our favorite conference moments and discussed:

• Helping introverted students practice networking tools
• Helping students know their "pitch"
• Setting expectations of students for conferences in terms of behavior, networking, and learning new science
• Using the social nature of conferences to get to know your students better

For tips on preparing students to present at conferences check out episode # 5 Let's Talk: Tips to build effective oral communicators

If you are enjoying this podcast please leave a rating or review, and join us over on Twitter to let us know what topics you'd like to hear more about.
You can also join the conversation on our LinkedIn group page The Graduate Mentoring Blueprint