The EECS Brown Bag Series, exclusively tailored for faculty and graduate students within the EECS department, takes place on the last Friday of every month during the fall and spring semesters from 12:30-1:30 in Min Kao 622. Join us and engage with our guest speakers, who will shed light on campus resources, new initiatives, and valuable information, fostering research collaborations, networking, and other opportunities among our faculty and students.

Mentoring by Design: Inside the Graduate School’s Next Level Scholar Development Ecosystem

Abstract

Graduate school is often described as an apprenticeship, but the truth is messier and more interesting: everyone in a research group, faculty, postdocs, and graduate students alike, is simultaneously mentoring and being mentored, absorbing and creating the norms and values of the field together. This talk offers a tour of the Graduate School’s scholar development and wellbeing ecosystem, with a particular focus on how mentorship is treated as both a relationship and a design problem. Drawing on the psychological science of motivation, the talk examines the features of research microclimates that predict graduate student persistence and contribution. The talk closes with a look at new tools the Graduate School is rolling out to build these norms deliberately, including aspects of the UT Mentoring Initiative such as mentorship maps and individual development plans, with an open invitation to help design, test, and improve the mentoring culture we’re all building together.

Biography

Jessi L. Smith is a psychology professor and a new Associate Dean in the Graduate School. She joined UT recently from California State University, where she served as Associate Vice President for Faculty Affairs and Development. Before that, she completed a detail at the National Science Foundation as a Program Director in the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Directorate, and spent eight years as Vice Provost for Research at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. She came up through the ranks at Montana State University, the state's flagship R1 land-grant institution. A social psychologist by training, her research examines how social contexts shape motivational and performance outcomes in the spaces where people learn and work, with a deep focus on the undergraduate and graduate research lab experience. She has published nearly 90 peer-reviewed articles and is an elected Fellow of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the American Psychological Association, and the Association for Psychological Science. She has secured more than $11 million in external funding from the NIH and NSF, including several professional development grants, and brings deep expertise in designing, testing, and scaling evidence-based programs that support scholar development, wellness, and career success.