BU Profiles Offers Faculty New Mentoring Feature

BUSM faculty are encouraged to take advantage of a new feature available on BU Profiles—mentoring.

Based on faculty requests to bolster mentoring in ways that are more highly visible, to showcase their mentoring expertise, and facilitate students, trainees and faculty to find mentors across the university, BU Profiles now provides an easy-to-use feature that enables you to highlight yourself as a research mentor and/or career mentor.

Please update your profile with a narrative about your approach and outlook on your mentoring, as well as even consider adding other customizations like a video clip of yourself explaining your perspective on how you mentor and/or inserting a Twitter feed that will enable others to explore your expertise and reach out to you. See examples of the different ways some faculty who have added mentoring here and here.

Please take advantage of the new mentoring feature that strengthens our institution-wide commitment to mentoring. A broad BU announcement will be made in a couple of weeks that will cause our academic community to go and try out the search for mentors and we need to have your mentoring descriptions already added to profiles. There is a new “Find Mentors” search option ready to be used.

Here are some suggested topics to include in your mentoring philosophy narrative:

• Who you are open to mentoring (e.g. students, residents, fellows, post-docs, faculty)
• Brief description of areas you are interested in mentoring in (specific research area, education expertise, career development, work-life integration)
• Mentoring experience (e.g. approximate numbers of mentees, mentees’ career stages, mentoring roles you have held)
• What aspects of mentoring you are most passionate about (e.g., your approach to working with mentees)

If you have questions about how to update your profile or the use of this new feature, please visit the Mentoring FAQs and what’s new on BU Profiles, or contact the BUMC IT Desk at bumchelp@bu.edu.  Don’t forget to ensure the mentoring section is visible on your profile by making it public.