I Need You to Show up for Me": The State of Mentorship for Underrepresented Minoritized Social Work Ph.D. Students and Junior Faculty and Our Hopes for the Future

Mentorship is crucial for success in completing doctoral programs and gaining successful tenures, with growing evidence supporting its importance for overall doctoral student and junior faculty success. Successful mentorship leads to increased retention rates, better learning experiences, confidence, better-prepared instructors, and an increased sense of connection and community among faculty and staff. Mentorship can support professional development in research, scholarship, and the academic socialization process, helping students navigate the political culture of doctoral programs, negotiate the academic job market, and problem-solve throughout their academic journey. The significance of diversity in higher education, particularly in doctoral education, cannot be overstated. Social work (SW) doctoral programs and institutions are responsible for ensuring an adequate and suitable supply of educators, researchers, and trainers for the next generation of practitioners who can promote equitable, person-in-environment research agendas to alleviate social problems. Despite claimed institutional diversity support, many underrepresented minoritized (URM) students do not complete their social work doctoral programs. Additionally, even after graduation and getting university appointments, many URM individuals continue experiencing personal, interpersonal , and structural discrimination. This round table focuses on the recent experiences around mentorship for minoritized social work scholars (students and junior faculty). It will consist of multiple scholars discussing their journeys of being mentored at different R01 institutions. The presentation team consists of students and junior faculty holding minoritized identities at various intersections of race, gender, sexuality, (different) abilities, and immigrant status. The team will share experiences from these intersectional perspectives, identifying different mentorship models within their doctoral programs and our experiences within them. They will outline the current research landscape within URM SW Ph.D. student mentorship, discussing mentorship in different universities in the United States, with perspectives prioritizing comprehensive mentorship that addresses academic and personal goals. The speakers will provide exemplary narrative cases of academic mentorship for doctoral education, identifying and focusing on doctoral students' perspectives and experiences of mentorship within the academy. The team will also facilitate a strength-based innovative conversation with the audience, identifying the students' and mentors' needs and expectations regarding institutional support and support from each other. Using group model-building techniques and instant electronic ratings, the presenters will collaboratively develop strategic lists of impactful changes to optimize the mentorship experience for all. Engaging in the workshop will give the existing mentors an understanding of the incoming and existing students' mentorship experience, inviting them to modify their strategies to improve the experience. It will also give the students a deeper understanding of the complex system being navigated by the mentors and guide them in supporting their mentors to becoming better mentors. Finally, participants in the workshop will be invited to participate in a long-term research project by the presenters to support the development of structural, institutional, and interpersonal improvements for mentorship within social work doctoral education. The goal of the roundtable is to illuminate systemic and structural challenges for SW doctoral students and junior faculty and determine strategies to leverage mentorship to improve student experiences.