Mentors connect academic staff

With close to 16,000 employees and more than 40,000 students at the UW, trying to understand how the university functions may be just as difficult as trying to understand the governance of a city. The Academic Staff Mentoring Program aims to help staff become more familiar with the university, foster connections across departments, and promote professional and personal development.

Any academic staff member can apply to be a mentor or mentee.

Lori Devine, fitness director for the Division of Recreational Sports, sought a mentor last year to get to know people outside of her area. Setting times to meet with other people across campus helped her make sure she would follow through on her goal to network with other employees.

“I was entering my third year on campus,” she says. “I thought it was a time to reach out. It takes a year just to get used to where things are because you just want to acclimate first.”

Devine met with her mentor a few times since last spring, and they e-mail each other occasionally. And she hopes to switch to the other side of the program by mentoring someone this spring.

Devine’s mentor, Barbara Arnold, has mentored an employee each year since the academic mentoring program began in the late 1990s. Then a member of the Academic Staff Professional Development and Recognition Committee, Arnold says the mentoring program was started for a variety of reasons, from helping academic staff meet their professional goals to making them feel welcome at the university to getting them involved in university governance. She says the program has changed over the years from having structured meetings every month to letting mentoring pairs choose their own schedule.

“It’s up to the pairs to define which goals they’re seeking,” says Arnold, a senior admissions and placement adviser in the School of Library and Information Studies. She says she’s served as a sounding board for ideas and helped others tailor specialties.

Last year, 36 pairs participated in the mentoring program, Arnold says.

Jim Ferris, associate faculty associate in the Department of Communication Arts, says he entered the mentoring program in his third year at UW–Madison to learn more about how the university functions.

“I think I’d been here long enough to know what I didn’t know,” he says. Ferris hoped understanding how the university works at the larger level would help his work in his own department. He also joined the Academic Staff Assembly to play a role in shaping the university and has mentored several staff members over the years.

The deadline to apply for the Academic Staff Mentoring Program is Monday, Feb. 14. Application forms and more information are available at the program’s Web site.