Mentee-Mentor Agreement

Mentee-Mentor Agreement in Conjunction with Flight Tracker
In Flight Tracker, go to the Mentors menu.
Select Mentee-Mentor Agreements Dashboard.
Follow the three-step process.

Mentee-Mentor Agreement Without Flight Tracker

The mentee logs in to the tool and spends approximately 30-45 minutes answering questions via the online portal. Completion by the mentee initiates an email to the mentor indicating an agreement is ready for review. Next, the mentee and mentor schedule an hour to meet and discuss each question, focusing on those questions for which mentee and mentor viewpoints do not align. Ideally, this prompts productive discussions about those viewpoints, and ultimately results in a final and agreed upon response. Once complete, users can save and store the final agreement in the online portal—editable at any time—and a PDF version may be saved or printed.

The Mentee-Mentor Agreement aspires to be a living document to revisit and adjust over time. Mentoring relationships develop and change over time, and so the Mentee-Mentor Agreement needs to adapt to those changes. After the initial meeting, it is recommended the mentee and mentor(s) revisit the Agreement six months later. They can address topics not previously discussed and confirm that their original responses still align. To keep current, the mentee and mentor should then revisit the document annually. By offering this iterative process, the Agreement provides the mentee and mentor a deliberate opportunity to reflect on current career stage needs and successes accomplished and to discuss how to address minor hiccups or major issues that may have arisen.

The Mentee-Mentor Agreement asks a series of questions under broad categories:

• 1:1 Meetings
• Lab Meetings
• Communication
• Mentoring Panel
• Financial Support
• Scientific Development
• Approach to Scholarly Products
• Career & Professional Development
  • NIH’s yearly Individual Development Plan (IDP) requirements

View a sample agreement

First, check out the EdgeForScholars.org blog post entitled Getting Expectations in Line with an Online Mentoring Agreement. This post is designed to introduce the topic to you and relevant stakeholders.

If your group and/or institution would like to employ the Mentee-Mentor Agreement program, then you have two options to adopt, depending on your situation.

A. If you have Flight Tracker installed to track your group of scholars:

1. Check on your Flight Tracker Home page that the Mentee-Mentor piece is On.
2. Under the Mentor menu, go to Mentee-Mentor Agreements Dashboard. Follow the three steps there.
   1. First, configure any institutional resources to be checked off.
   2. Second, make sure the REDCap user-ids for all the scholars and mentors are stored properly in REDCap.
   3. Third, share the link to access the agreements.
3. Your local Flight Tracker will then house any completed agreements.Long term, Flight Tracker will automatically queue up reminder emails to go to the scholar-mentor pair at appropriate times (namely, 6-12 months after its completion).

B. If you have scholars that aren’t being tracked by Flight Tracker:

Your scholars can still use a restricted version of the Mentee-Mentor Agreement. Be aware that Vanderbilt will house and own any data collected by this process.

Have your scholar/mentee visit https://redcap.link/ft_mma and sign up to fill out an agreement. Flight Tracker will contact the mentor when completed. No long-term follow up will take place under this system (i.e., repeating the agreement in six months).

The Mentee-Mentor Agreement has been updated to fulfill the NIH’s yearly Individual Development Plan (IDP) requirements. You’re welcome!