Volunteered or Voluntold? The Motivations and Perceived Outcomes of Graduate and Postdoctoral Mentors of Undergraduate Researchers

Abstract

Graduate students and postdoctoral researchers (postgraduates) in the life sciences frequently mentor undergraduate researchers, especially at research universities. Yet there has been only modest investigation of this relationship from the postgraduate perspective. We conducted an exploratory study of the experiences of 32 postgraduate mentors from diverse institutions, life sciences disciplines, and types of research to examine their motivations for mentoring and their perceived outcomes. Although some postgraduates reported feeling pressured to mentor undergraduate researchers, all expressed personal motivations, including both agentic (self-focused) and communal (community-focused) motivations. These postgraduates reported benefits and costs of mentoring that had both vocational and psychosocial elements. Given that our results indicated that even postgraduates who engaged in mentoring at the request of their faculty advisors had their own motivations, we conducted a second phase of analysis to determine the extent to which our results aligned with different theories of motivation (self-determination theory, social cognitive career theory, expectancy-value theory, social exchange theory). We end by proposing a model of postgraduate mentoring of undergraduate researchers that integrates the theories supported by our findings.

FIGURE 1.

Integrated model of postgraduate mentoring motivations. We propose a model of postgraduate motivations to mentor undergraduate researchers that integrates elements of self-determination theory, social cognitive career theory, and expectancy-value theory. On the basis of our results, we hypothesize that mentoring self-efficacy (competence) and outcomes expectations influence whether postgraduates intend to mentor, which in turn influences whether they engage in mentoring. We further hypothesize that postgraduates expect to realize both communal and agentic outcomes from mentoring undergraduate researchers. We also propose that the relationship between motivations and intentions is moderated by the extent to which postgraduates’ decisions to mentor are both within their control (locus of causality) and aligned with their personal interests (autonomy). In other words, if postgraduates do not perceive they have a choice to mentor or if mentoring does not align with their personal interests, their mentoring self-efficacy and outcomes expectations will have less influence on whether and how they engage in mentoring.