6) Mentorship Within the Group

6.1 Graduate-to-Graduate Mentoring

It is recommended that you seek out an ongoing personal development relationship with a more experienced group member. Spending time in the office is a great first step to developing relationships within the group. Working in the office allows for easy access to an abundance of knowledge from your colleagues on research, data, programs, courses, professors, conferences, publications, etc.

6.2 Graduate Student / Post-doc Relationship

The group generally has two or three Post-doctoral Fellows that are working as part of the research team. Post-docs are an excellent resource to provide mentorship and guidance to graduate students. You should expect to be matched with one of the post-docs to be your primary point of contact. Graduate students are welcome to speak and work with any post-doc that is not their primary contact, in fact it's encouraged if it helps advance research. Graduate students should leverage the relationship with post-docs to get feedback on their research progress, help in editing publications, and advice on how to navigate the challenges of grad school. In general, graduate students should submit draft publications to a post-doc for review before submitting anything to Dr. Webber. It is also recommended that draft publications are reviewed by another graduate student before anything is submitted to a post-doc. This process of multiple peer reviews helps to ensure that the product is of high quality before it reaches Dr. Webber. 

Graduate students should plan to meet with a post-doc on a semi-regular basis to get feedback on research progress. Post-docs are generally much more available than Dr. Webber. Due to post-docs involvement in the research conducted by graduate students, graduate students should expect to include their primary post-doc on any publications, unless the post-doc did not contribute to the work.

6.3 Undergraduate Research Assistants

Dr. Webber commonly hires Undergraduate Research Assistants to provide support to graduate students within the group. This is a great opportunity to serve as a mentor while advancing your research.  If you have an undergraduate that you have been given permission to hire, you must see Sarah De Berry-Caperton to process the assignment and take care of required employment documents. Do not have the student do ANY WORK until this is done or they will not be paid. You must notify Sarah at the beginning of each semester to assign the student worker.