In our 2020 institutional survey on mentoring, fourth-year students identified on-campus student employment as the fifth most common experience that prepared them to connect with potential mentors. Supervisors of student employees offer a dynamic example of meaningful relationships that can evolve into mentoring relationships.

Resources like IowaGROW (Guided Reflection on Work) offer supervisors strategies for facilitating recurring and developmental conversations about students’ professional goals. As Hansen and Hoag (2018) note, IowaGROW offers a structure for leaning into ongoing relationships and four questions that prompt student employees to reflect on how their work experience informs their course-based learning and how they’re applying their academic experience to their employment.

In our institutional interviews with staff colleagues, many mentioned the inherent value of ElonGROW, Elon’s authorized adaption of IowaGrow, as in this example:

We’re looking at how to make student employment more of a high impact practice. And I definitely think that mentoring is not just sitting down having a conversation, shooting the breeze, it’s also important … I think this is a great springboard and it can help you think as a supervisor in terms of what takeaways can you get from this, from Iowa Grow, to make it then Elon Grow … And I think the main thing is based on preparing students for their future life and what skills they need to have for these competencies.

Of course, these supervisor-student conversations aren’t inherently mentoring relationships, but they are meaningful relationships that might evolve into mentoring relationships. In the quote above, for instance, we see both intentionality and a commitment to extended time. We also see career support. As these characteristics and functions increase within a supervisor-employee relationship, students might begin to identify the relationship as mentoring.

Interestingly, many of the staff we interacted with throughout our institutional self-study didn’t self-identify as mentors. They acknowledged their meaningful relationships with students as their work supervisors, but they hesitate to identify their relationships as mentoring relationships unless their interactions with the students have had opportunities to evolve over time, as the following examples highlight:

To me, being a mentor is being someone who has additional experience that the person you’re mentoring may not have, and being able to provide some insight or just a person that you bounce ideas off of … Or if you’re talking about career advancement or … student involvement, whenever I can provide insight and resources, that’s the type of mentor I want to be. And that’s sort of the type of mentor I aspire to work with when I’m being mentored myself, someone who has that additional experience, who can bring something to the table that maybe I had not thought about.

And we start with working together. That’s the basis of our relationship, is that we are working together, and our work is really important and it’s complex. There’s a fair amount of coaching and support and mentoring that goes into work. I usually have …  a portfolio of students that I work with. I have one-on-one meetings. We start with the work, but then those relationships tend to grow into more mentoring relationships.

In both of these examples, mentoring relationships “evolve over time, becoming more reciprocal and mutually beneficial” and “are individualized, attending to mentees’ developing strengths and shifting needs.” The relationships extend beyond discrete moments, instead germinating from ongoing work relationships that sometimes span multiple years. And as the relationships shift from supervising to a supervisor who is mentoring, the functions the staff mentor is supporting also extend career-focused learning for the current on-campus job to promoting academic, social, personal, identity, cultural, and/or future career-focused learning and development.

This multi-functional mentoring also embraces students’ agency and lifelong learning, recognizing that mentees have “developing strengths and shifting needs”:

For me, for the mentoring role [with student workers], it is helping them to do several things. One is to become more confident in themselves …. helping them to learn to be confident and to balance everything … And so we develop a relationship that is sort of all-encompassing. And there’s a fine line there because I’m their supervisor. But at the same time, by the time they leave and I watched them grow over those four years, we developed such a bond that some of them have referred to me almost as a second mother, and then some of them as a friend, and I always get feedback from them, which is so touching to me when they leave. And they say, ‘I’ve learned so much from you.’ So I’m hoping that what they learned from me is that you can balance all those things, that you can think independently, that not everyone has the same strengths and that’s okay, and that it’s okay to have weaknesses, but that you need to continue to work on those even after you leave here.

Many campuses offer professional development on supervising student employees, drawing on resources like IowaGROW and the Key Practices for Fostering Engaged Learning. As institutions move towards emphasizing supervisor-employee relationships as potential sites for mentoring, professional development for supervisors should emphasize that both meaningful and mentoring relationships honor student agency. We appreciate that many of our staff colleagues in our institutional study didn’t automatically self-identify as mentors for all their student employees because mentoring relationships should be reciprocal. Still, as relationship characteristics like time, intentionality, and trust grow, and as supervisors increase specific functional supports (e.g., career support, cultural support, identity support, etc.), student employment may shift from a supportive context to a meaningful relationship to a mentoring relationship.

References

Hansen, Sarah L., and Beth A. Hoag. 2018. “Promoting Learning, Career Readiness, and Leadership in Student Employment.” New Directions for Student Leadership 157: 85-99.

Authors

Jessie L. Moore is Director of the Center for Engaged Learning and Professor of English: Professional Writing & Rhetoric at Elon University.

Maureen Vandermaas-Peeler is a Professor of Psychology and founding Director of Elon’s Center for Research on Global Engagement at Elon University.

Tim Peeples is Senior Associate Provost Emeritus and Professor of Humanities at Elon University. He also holds the position of Senior Scholar in the Center for Engaged Learning.

Learn more about the authors and the Mentoring Matters project.

How to Cite this Post

Moore, Jessie L., Maureen Vandermaas-Peeler, and Tim Peeples. 2024, December 10. “Mentoring in a Constellation: Supervisors and Mentors of Student Employees.” In Mentoring Matters: Supporting Students’ Development of Mentoring Constellations in Higher Education. Elon University Center for Engaged Learning. https://www.centerforengagedlearning.org/mentoring-in-a-constellation-supervisors-and-mentors-of-student-employees/.