蜜桃传媒

Whether you are completing research, writing a manuscript, need teaching tips, or are seeking career development, UB MentorNet is there to connect you to an experienced faculty member who can offer helpful guidance. Mentors will have the opportunity to engage in meaningful service in support of their junior colleagues and to expand their network of collaborators within the UB community.

During the first phase of of implementation, UB MentorNet will serve the purpose of connecting junior and senior faculty members to engage in productive mentoring. Inherent benefits of programs that support formation and guidance of faculty mentoring relationships in general can be found here. The unique advantage of MentorNet lies in its ability to support diverse mentoring approaches at scale. This is achieved by merging the browsing, searching, and match-making features,  broadly established in user-driven social media platforms, with the specific requirements and abilities of a faculty mentoring and networking application:

• User-Friendly Profile Setup, Generation of Tags and Categories
• User-Managed Privacy
• Customized Search and Saving of Favorites
• Intelligent Matching Algorithm
• Built-in Outreach and Connection
• Communication, Discussion Fora, and Event Tools
• Feedback System

Going forward, UB MentorNet will be capable of functioning as an optional framework and umbrella to provide infrastructure and resources for other established or developing mentoring programs that exist locally in the units or centers, as well as initiatives for specific faculty audiences and non-faculty stakeholder groups. Examples might include:

• LAUNCH program piloted for international faculty 
• Ongoing mentoring in the Gender Institute
• Mentoring for graduate students and postdoctoral scholars

Further out, we envision an expansion of the UB networking functions to stakeholders and partners beyond the university. At this stage, the platform will enable faculty and their spouses to link to communities outside of UB in order to seek out opportunities for employment, support services, collaborations for community-based research, and other forms of engagement.

After multiple demonstrations to key audiences, we are now prepared to launch a pilot study and are seeking faculty volunteers to serve as mentors or mentees. In this study, we are asking the volunteers to log in themselves and to engage directly with the networking application and other enrolled users. Participant feedback will help us refine the platform ahead of a broader campus rollout.

As volunteers during the pilot, faculty will be able to create, review and modify their user profiles that highlight their research, teaching, and career development interests, their mentoring needs or areas of mentoring expertise, respectively. Study participants will be able to explore the platform’s features, including browsing and filtering faculty profiles across departments, saving favorites, and initiating connections. MentorNet also includes communication tools, a calendar, task lists, and discussion fora that are open for exploration.

Personalized log-in credentails will be generated for registered volunteers and communicated via email, allowing them to enter into the portal for beta-testing purposes.