Training to be a Good Mentor: Inclusive Engineering Leadership

I haven’t met anyone in academia who didn’t have a story about a mentor. The motley collection of tales I’ve been told covers everything; the good, the bad, and the ugly. Despite how prevalent mentoring is in higher education, most curricula are missing any course that trains students to be mentors or leaders. This lack of official training may be one reason why students report such varied experiences with mentors. 

The Inclusive Engineering Leadership (BME 790) course seeks to address this need by giving students the opportunity to get formal instruction and a practicum in mentoring, alongside course credit, and its first offering was supported in part by The Graduate School's Professional Development Grant. Despite the name, the course is designed to support anyone who wants to be a good mentor, not just engineers. This experience isn’t limited to those who want to be a professor either. Whether you pursue a career in academia, industry, or some other sector, a Ph.D. graduate is often expected to mentor others and assume a leadership role at work. Through discussions, written assignments, and hands-on experience, this course gives students a head start on important skills needed to lead multifaceted groups, by learning to mentor diverse individuals in an effective and comprehensive way.

This summer course is split into two parts. In the first half, students converse with and learn from each other and from a variety of established mentors at Duke and beyond on topics such as ethics, teaching, and intercultural communications. Additionally, students refine their ability to succinctly and effectively communicate complex topics using short, interactive teaching demos, develop and execute a shared expectations document to use with their mentees, craft a personal leadership philosophy, explore the history of the Duke and Durham community and its impact on local students, and collect a toolbox of resources to foster well-being for both mentors and mentees during difficult times.

Image

The second half of the course serves as a practicum, asking graduate students to directly mentor Durham high school students or undergraduates in their journey as researchers. The practicums cover a range of formats, many of them 1-on-1, but my specific mentoring scenario involved teaching 10 high school students a week-long course I developed for the Duke Research in Engineering Program (DukeREP) program, a summer program pairing interested high schoolers with Ph.D. students for coursework and the chance to do research. In my class, I introduced students to computer-aided drug discovery, guiding them through the process of identifying a medicine that failed in clinical trials and designing a new one that was predicted to fix its issue. I additionally incorporated activities where students moved around the room to help learn types of algorithms, discussed real ethical case studies, formed letters with their bodies to categorize molecular properties, and culminated the class with a pitch workshop for their new drug designs. 

Normally, it takes about three times as long to prepare materials as it will take to implement them, but the more engaging that the material is, the longer it can take. My students stated that the interactive activities were the highlight of the course, which made every minute of extra preparation worth it. One student shared how thrilled she was to tell her parents and friends about her summer internship after the class because she could now actually explain what she was doing in her summer program. In designing this course to give my students something tangible to walk away with regardless of career path they ultimately chose, I looked beyond just the technical to support more broadly applicable development, like these communication skills that allowed my student to articulate what her summer experience was all about in her upcoming college interviews. 

Despite the inescapable compounding factors and nuances to consider in any relationship, mentoring is a skill that can be trained. The more time we spend thinking about, discussing, and reflecting on being good people, leaders, and mentors, the better shot we have at achieving these goals. I learned a lot through fruitful discussions with my classmates and teachers, all of whom truly wanted to help others. Hands-on experience mentoring students allowed me to implement the mentorship techniques I had reflected on and adapt them in real time to support young scholars. I’d recommend this course (returning in summer 2026) to anyone who thinks they may be in a leadership position at some point, or who just wants to be better at helping others, whatever setting that may be in.

Author

Image

Zachary Fralish, Ph.D.

Recent Ph.D. graduate, Biomedical Engineering

Zachary Fralish graduated with his Ph.D. from the Reker Lab in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. His research focuses on the design of safer medicines using machine learning. He is currently a research fellow at Collage Venture Partners and will soon be starting his own lab in the Chemistry, Biochemistry, and Physics department at Florida Southern College.