Submit your feedback on the draft plan to strengthen graduate advising and mentoring

To the members of the MIT community,

Today we write to announce the release of the draft Strategic Plan on Graduate Advising and Mentoring – an exciting next step in the Institute's ongoing efforts to support our graduate students and the faculty and thesis supervisors who advise and mentor them.

We encourage you to read the draft plan and provide your feedback via the committee website or email. Your perspectives are essential and will inform the final plan that the committee will provide to the MIT community later this spring.

Charged in June 2021 by the provost, chancellor, and chair of the faculty with developing a strategic plan to guide policies and programs that support excellence in graduate advising and mentoring at MIT, the Ad Hoc Committee on Graduate Advising and Mentoring focused on:

• Professional skill development and lifelong learning in mentorship
• Methods for graduate student feedback
• Mechanisms to prevent negative advising and mentoring experiences as much as possible, and when they occur, to address them promptly and appropriately

Throughout the development of the draft plan, the committee was inspired by the work of the Graduate Student Council, the local efforts underway in the schools and the college, and the support of MIT’s senior officers.

A few key components of the committee’s draft strategic plan are:

• The establishment of a Center for Excellence in Advising and Mentoring that would offer programs and resources to faculty, thesis supervisors, and graduate students across MIT to support excellence in advising and mentoring.
• Assessments to evaluate the advising and mentoring experiences of all graduate students to (a) identify trends across the Institute, (b) foster continuous improvement of mentoring and advising, and (c) improve annual merit performance review and promotion and tenure processes.
• An Advising and Mentoring Grievance Response Team that would augment the resources of the Institute for addressing negative advising and mentoring experiences and serve as an entry point for graduate students to report concerns.

We thank the students, staff and faculty committee members for their dedication, creativity, thoughtfulness and collaborative spirit throughout the entire process. We are grateful to the members of the MIT community who shared their experiences and ideas that helped shape this draft plan. Throughout our work we consulted and sought input from faculty committees, student groups, and key staff who work with our graduate students, and that work will continue.

We look forward to your feedback over the next several weeks as we finalize the plan.

With very best wishes,

Paula Hammond
Committee Co-chair
Institute Professor and Head of the Chemical Engineering Department

Tim Jamison
Committee Co-chair
Associate Provost and Robert Robinson Taylor Professor of Chemistry