Who This is For
FORGE Mentors is uniquely designed for faculty at any career stage who are:
- Mentoring graduate students, postdocs, or early career faculty.
- Interested in improving their mentoring effectiveness.
- Contributing to a research team or institutional development.
- Note: Unlike other FORGE programs, participation is not tied to a specific career stage.
What You'll Gain
Evidence-Based Mentoring Strategies
- Learn to effectively align expectations.
- Master methods for communication.
- Support long-term mentee independence and growth.
Tools to Support Mentee Success
- Access structured mentoring frameworks.
- Deploy actionable strategies for comprehensive professional development.
Skills to Strengthen Research Teams
- Foster highly inclusive, productive research environments.
- Strategically guide and support your mentees' complex research trajectories.
Contribution to FSU's Culture
- Build scalable mentoring capacity across the entire institution.
- Elevate ongoing faculty and trainee success parameters at scale.
Interested in Strengthening Your Mentoring Practice?
Ready to learn evidence-based strategies, improve communication dynamics, and expand your impact within FSU's research environment?
Program Components
FORGE Mentors seamlessly integrates a structured training curriculum, hands-on practical application, and flexible engagement options.
Research Mentor Academy
Provides evidence-based mentor training grounded firmly in national curriculum models. Focuses intensely on core mentoring competencies, including communication, expectation alignment, support for independence, promotion of professional development, and ethical/inclusive mentoring practices.
Faculty progress through structured modules and directly apply these methods to current mentoring relationships.
Applied Mentoring Practice
- Reflect critically on your current personal mentoring approaches.
- Identify specific institutional or lab areas for growth and improvement.
- Apply new leadership strategies directly within your immediate active research teams.
- Emphasis is heavily focused on learning by doing, not just passive training.
Connection to the Mentoring Ecosystem
Connects participating faculty to a far broader network of active mentoring initiatives at FSU. This includes undergraduate research mentoring (UROP), specialized faculty development tracks, and institutional graduate student mentoring programs to maximize systemic continuity across relationships at all levels.
Flexible Engagement
- Participate in training modules at any time.
- Revisit digital core resources and toolkit materials over time as needed.
- Faculty may engage freely at any point along their mentoring journey.
- Ongoing Research Development support is always accessible to help meet your programmatic research goals. One-time custom mentoring workshops are also available upon strategic request by a Dean, Chair, or other institutional research leaders.
How You Can Engage
Faculty can flexibly interact with the FORGE Mentors infrastructure across a variety of avenues:
- Formally join the FSU Research Mentor Academy.
- Participate in targeted standalone mentor training sessions.
- Integrate evidence-based mentoring strategies seamlessly into your team.
- Connect cleanly with broader mentoring resource structures across campus.
How FORGE Mentors Fits into Your Research Journey
FORGE Mentors uniquely complements other FORGE programs by focusing heavily on developing people, rather than just isolated projects. Depending on your current objectives, you can seamlessly cycle through the tracks:
Interested in Strengthening Your Mentoring Practice?
Ready to learn evidence-based strategies, improve communication dynamics, and expand your impact within FSU's research environment?