Students’ Guide to Industrial Mentoring

Outlining Goals and Expectations for Your Potential Industrial Mentor

So now you have found some candidates that are appropriate to your project through the searchable database. You have talked with your advisor to decide which one is most suited to your project. What do you do next? The most important thing is to be clear about what you want from your contact with industry. Most likely, they really want to help you, and they want to do a good job, but they are also very busy. If you let them know in advance what you will expect from them, they can better assess whether they can make the time to work with you.

     If you would like this person to simply consult on your project, meaning answer a few specific questions about instrumentation or the relevance of your project in an industrial setting...

• Contact them and let them know briefly what your project is about and what information you would like from them. If you anticipate more questions in the future, you might want to let them know that they can expect to hear from you from time to time with more questions, but that this will not be a major time commitment.

• After you have implemented their suggestions, let them know if this has had a positive impact on your project and what the results were. The document "Providing Feedback for Your Mentor/Consultant" will give you some ideas about what to include. You might also ask them if they would like you to give a copy of your feedback to their manager.

If you would like this person to be the industrial mentor for your project, meaning be involved actively in the project, perhaps even invite you to work at their company for some time on your system...

• Contact them and let them know what you are working on. Tell them why your project is of interest to them and find out if they have the time to mentor your project. If they would like to know what being a mentor would involve, give them some examples of things you could work on together and what you hope to learn from their experience (that way, if they are not the appropriate person or don't have the time to work with you, perhaps they can at least recommend someone else at their company who could mentor your project).

• Outline what you will expect from your mentor and what you hope to accomplish from this relationship. Start a dialog with them on your goals and expectation to develop a reasonable plan.

• Determine whether it would be appropriate to outline for their manager how your mentor has moved your project forward and how they have gain insight to help them in their own work. (Managers need to know that mentors are very important to our work, so that they will continue to allow them to mentor ERC students.) The document "Providing Feedback for Your Mentor/Consultant" will give you some ideas about what to include.

Providing Feedback for Your Mentor/Consultant

After you having begun interacting with your mentor or consultant, it would be useful to them to know how they have helped your project. This document is intended as a starting point for providing this feedback to your mentor or consultant. You should check with them to see if it would be appropriate to send this to their manager, so that they will know how beneficial industrial interactions are to our progress.

Your feedback should include the following information:

1. Project summary - a brief (one paragraph) description of your project

2. Progress prior to interaction - where you were and the questions you had before contacting your mentor or consultant, also you may want to include why you contacted this person in particular

3. Interaction description - a general description of the information that your mentor or consultant provided or the work that you did together on your project

4. Progress summary - a brief description of how this interaction helped your project move forward, including how your mentor/consultant's answers or work affected your perception of your project's key questions and why it was particularly important that these answers have an industry perspective

5. Future work - if you plan to have future interactions with your mentor/consultant, outline what these might involve