Mentoring Programs

To supplement departmental mentoring activities, the college offers an evolving set of programs designed to provide junior faculty with the necessary knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed to be successful in their academic roles. These programs are grounded in recommendations from literature in academic medicine and focus on best practices for supporting faculty and aiding their personal and professional development.

Mentoring benefits faculty in a number of ways including increased publications in peer-reviewed outlets, increased grant support, and greater job satisfaction. Further, mentoring can improve faculty’s feelings of academic self-efficacy and can help in the development of professional networks. Networks are important because “successful higher education faculty, those who get promoted and tenured, who get recognized for contributions, who produce more and significant research, frequently consult colleagues.”

Clinician Educator Mentoring Program (CEMP)

Physician faculty, known as "clinician educators", are responsible for implementing the patient care and educational mission at most medical schools. These faculty have grown in numbers in recent years. Nationally, clinician educators face a variety of issues that directly impact their job satisfaction and retention. They move more slowly toward academic promotion and have fewer mentoring and career development opportunities than their research and tenure system colleagues. The result is a lower commitment to academic medicine and high turnover. To support our clinician educators, the College of Human Medicine launched the Clinician Educator Mentoring Program (CEMP). This program is currently on hiatus.

Tenure System Mentoring Program

In the fall of 2005, a college-level Faculty Excellence Task Force offered recommendations to improve the support for tenure-system faculty in the College of Human Medicine. The Tenure System Mentoring Program supplements the work of departmental mentoring programs by providing targeted mentoring for junior faculty on the path to tenure at Michigan State University.

CHM Mentoring Circles

In the spring of 2021, a focus group of fixed term faculty and academic specialists in the college provided input on current and desired mentoring support for faculty in these appointment systems.  In response, the college launched the CHM Mentoring Circles program to complement departmental mentoring programs for these groups of faculty. The mentoring program design is built on the Mentoring Circles programming from the AAMC Group on Faculty Affairs. Foundational ideas supporting the program design are the importance of evolving mentoring across the career lifespan; the benefit of multiple mentors for targeted purposes, and the benefits of peer and near-peer mentors.