EAGER: Mentoring, Networks, and Under-represented Minorities in the Science Pipeline

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According to recent reports, mentoring is integral to increasing the share of under-represented minorities in the science pipeline. Both the federal government and private foundations have put millions of dollars into training and mentoring programs for under-represented minorities with little information about whether these programs have paid off in terms of increasing retention and productivity in the scientific workforce. Although mentoring has become a norm of graduate training, its current conceptualization is limited. Mentoring is usually thought of as a dyadic relationship between mentor and mentee rather than a dynamic and complex networked system with patterns of linkages. The American Sociological Association?s 35 year-old Minority Fellowship Program (MFP) attempts to create such networks. The purpose of this exploratory study is to compare outcomes in terms of career trajectories, scientific productivity, transformative scholarships, and disciplinary service of members of MFP networks with outcomes of other groups. This project is exploratory because the principal investigators need to determine whether enough data on the MFP Fellows, as well as the other comparison groups, can be obtained at an acceptable cost, and whether these data can be used in a comparative study of mentoring, collaboration, and productivity networks.If successful, this exploratory study should have three outcomes. First, it can provide a model for studying the structure and efficacy of mentoring networks in other STEM disciplines. Second, its findings can be used to recommend changes that can increase the effectiveness of scientific mentoring programs for under-represented minorities. An additional contribution is to develop and apply new approaches to measuring mentoring in order to improve our ability to describe and analyze the ties and linkages among minority sociologists. When completed, this comparative study can tell us the value added by MFP mentoring networks.