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

根据最近的报告，指导对于增加科学管道中代表性不足的少数民族的份额是不可或缺的。联邦政府和私人基金会都投入了数百万美元用于针对少数族裔的培训和指导项目，但这些项目是否在提高科研人员的留任率和生产力方面取得了成效，却鲜有信息。导师制虽已成为研究生培养的一种规范，但其目前的概念化程度有限。师徒关系通常被认为是导师和被徒弟之间的二元关系，而不是具有联系模式的动态复杂网络系统。美国社会学协会？美国有35年历史的少数族裔奖学金计划（MFP）试图创建这样的网络。本探索性研究的目的是比较MFP网络成员在职业轨迹、科学生产力、变革奖学金和学科服务方面的结果与其他群体的结果。这个项目是探索性的，因为主要研究人员需要确定是否可以以可接受的成本获得MFP研究员以及其他比较组的足够数据，以及这些数据是否可以用于指导、协作和生产力网络的比较研究。如果成功，这项探索性研究应该有三个结果。首先，它可以为研究其他STEM学科的师徒网络结构和有效性提供一个模型。其次，它的发现可以用来建议改变，以提高对代表性不足的少数群体的科学指导计划的有效性。另一个贡献是开发和应用新的方法来衡量指导，以提高我们描述和分析少数民族社会学家之间的联系和联系的能力。本比较研究完成后，可以告诉我们MFP师徒网络的附加价值。

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.