After Chase Stehly arrived to start classes at the University of South Dakota in 2016, he encountered someone who would change the course of his life.

“I met Meghann on my first day of college,” said Stehly in reference to Meghann Jarchow, Ph.D., professor and chair of USD’s Department of Sustainability & Environment.

“When I first got to college, my science and math skills were below average, and I had little faith in my ability as a student to succeed within an academic environment such as a university. Meghann made it clear from the beginning that the skills I lacked were improvable,” he said. “And she was 100% right.”

Stehly went on to earn a bachelor's degree in sustainability and is now in the department’s graduate program.

“Without Meghann’s support as a mentor, I would have never finished my undergraduate degree, and I would have never felt confident enough to enroll into a grad program at USD,” Stehly said.

Stehly’s story is not unique. Both students and faculty who took part in the college’s strategic planning activities over the 2021–2022 academic year said mentoring of students was a strength of the college.

“Faculty and students within the college say that we do an excellent job with mentoring and elevating students and engaging them in extracurricular activities like research and internships and very unique life experiences that they don’t necessarily have the opportunity to do on other campuses,” said Jessica Messersmith, Ph.D., associate dean of the college and professor of communication sciences and disorders.

To build on this success, the college designed a training workshop to give faculty tools and resources to enhance their mentorship of students. Messersmith and the six members of the college’s faculty affairs committee developed a mentoring workbook and workshop. The college then held a pilot version of the workshop in the final weeks of the academic year last December with a group that included all committee members and six additional faculty members from the college.

The workshop started by defining mentorship as a relationship between two people, where one individual holds more experience, knowledge, and connections while the other individual is seeking to develop these traits.

“One of our key objectives of the mentoring training program is to highlight that a mentoring relationship isn’t intended to create a mentee in the mentor’s image,” Messersmith said. “Our job as mentors is to help students figure things out for themselves.”

Workshop attendees took part in various activities aimed at improving their mentorship skills. This included recalling their own mentors and how they helped them in their lives and careers. They also practiced communication skills such as reflective listening, effective questioning, identifying strengths and appreciative inquiry.

Chaoyang Jiang, Ph.D., professor and graduate program director in the Department of Chemistry, said he took away some valuable insights after attending the workshop.

“It’s good to remember when you talk to a mentee, you are not trying to make another person just like yourself,” Jiang said. “We want the student to study hard, but we also need to figure out what the student really wants, and what their challenges are, and try to find the right way or resource that will help them.”

Jiang, who currently advises 22 chemistry graduate students, said that serving as a mentor is different from his advising responsibilities, which involves guiding students through program requirements. Mentoring is less formal and clear-cut and relies on mentors’ ability to truly engage with their student mentees.

“In the workshop we learned skills to communicate – we can do more listening and ask more open-ended questions,” he said.

Kristina Lee, Ph.D., assistant professor of communication studies, also participated in the workshop’s debut last December after helping develop it as a member of the college’s faculty affairs committee.

The workshop activity that asked her to think back on her own past mentors allowed Lee to take the best parts of those experiences and apply them now as a mentor herself. In her undergraduate and graduate years, she could recall numerous professors who helped guide her to reach professional goals.

“This workshop made me think about how many influential mentors in my life weren’t long term mentors, but people like the one who pulled me into the office and said, ‘Hey, you write like a grad student. You should consider grad school,’” Lee said. “Just being willing to help a random student in a class of 40 people—that’s a form of mentorship, too.”

Jarchow also took part in the development of the workshop and participated in the pilot this past December. This workshop provides a much-needed service, she said.

“There’s good evidence that mentoring students is disproportionately impactful to student success,” Jarchow said. “Yet we didn't have expectations about what constitutes good mentoring and how we wanted people to do it.”

Students benefit when the college supports faculty members in their work to become better mentors, she said.

“My preference is that all faculty members see themselves as mentors to the students they are advising,” Jarchow said. “We’re competent at helping to pick out classes but we have a much greater skillset than that.”

The College of Arts & Sciences plans to offer the mentoring workshop at least once per year.

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