As you may know by now, graduate school is vastly different from your undergraduate experience. As an undergraduate, your goal was to obtain knowledge, while in graduate school your goal is to also contribute to a field of knowledge. Graduate school is the professional training ground where you learn the skills you need to be successful in your field and gain an understanding of how your discipline works.

Mentoring is important, not only because of the knowledge and skills you can learn from mentors, but also because mentoring provides professional socialization and personal support to facilitate success in graduate school and beyond. Quality mentoring greatly enhances your chances for success. Research shows that students who experience good mentoring also have a greater chance of securing academic tenure-track positions, or greater career advancement potential in administration or sectors outside the university. A recent survey of graduate students at UNL revealed that those who had developed mentoring relationships with faculty members were more likely to:

• receive financial support for their graduate studies in the form of assistantships, scholarships, or fellowships
• exhibit greater productivity in research activity, conference presentations, pre-doctoral publications, instructional development, and grant writing.
• experience a higher degree of success in persisting in graduate school, achieving shorter time to degree, and performing better in academic coursework.

(Bellows and Perry, 2005)