The importance of programwide efforts to mentor grad students (opinion)

Setting Up Relationships for Success: Mentoring CompactsSeveral graduate programs, such as the one at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, have created a mentoring compact template for their faculty and graduate students to complete annually and submit to the program chair. Mentoring compacts explicitly outline expectations for communication and meetings, work hours and projects, research milestones, and career exploration. By collecting mentoring compacts from faculty and graduate students, graduate programs ensure those conversations happen and continue to occur annually as the relationship evolves.