Native & Indigenous Mentorship Program

Intentional Mentorship Program for Native American & Indigenous Graduate Students in STEM

STEM Routes has collaborated with the Center for Native American & Indigenous Studies (CNAIS) to develop a mentorship program model for Native and Indigenous graduate students in STEM fields in the College of Arts & Sciences (CA&S). After inspecting some of the barriers inherent to the academic professional space that affect Native & Indigenous students, we requested funding to develop a program that centers student experiences and identities. We have designed our program with an approach to mentorship that minimizes inadvertent harm and empowers students through building community. Here are some of the ways our program stands out from other mentorship programs at the University of Colorado Boulder.

What makes our approach to mentorship better?

Cluster-based Mentorship

There are not enough Native and Indigenous faculty at CU Boulder to support all of our Native students and we don't want to assign more labor to folks who are already too often asked to serve their department or community. For this reason, we designed a cluster-based mentorship model that assigns multiple faculty and students to a mentorship group. In this way, the overlap of experiences is better equipped to complement students' identities and backgrounds.

Overlapping mentor and mentee experiences to better capture student identities and backgrounds
Nucleation of community to support students emotionally and psychologically in addition to offering career advice and guided professional development
Scaffolded mentorship as current students become mentors for the following year's incoming cohort of students

Supervision & Tracking

We'll be sending out regular surveys to both students and faculty members to ensure you feel supported and hear throughout this program.

Survey data helps us report on our program to fulfill requirements of the grant
Your feedback helps us improve the program as you go through it
Information gathered throughout the program helps us demonstrate proof-of-concept for this mentorship model so we can expand this to other groups on campus and secure additional future funding

We provide training to both students and faculty members to ensure you understand the nuances of being a good mentor and mentee. Our training is structured to help you develop skills that reach beyond the superficial checkboxes of other mentorship training programs.

You and your cluster have control over how your community looks. We provide mentorship agreement templates for your cluster and a one-on-one mentorship agreement template if you choose to pursue an individual mentoring outside of your cluster meetings. These templates guide you through establishing norms, expectations, and boundaries in your mentorship interactions to help you achieve your goals and enable you all to be vulnerable as you discuss deep topics related to identity and academia.

Agency & Power

Academic spaces often suppress the voices of marginalized groups. We are building a student-centered platform via which students can voice their needs to engaged faculty. Many faculty members carry a lot of weight in their respective programs. We ask faculty to use that to advocate for their community, making this program a grassroots approach for improving your academic professional communities.
We will provide guided content for your cluster meetings for the first few months. After this point, we invite students to approach conversations with their own content.
This is not our program to name. This program belongs to students, so we invite you to propose a name for this program that resonates with your intentions.

Indigenous Knowledge

The beautiful header on this page is called Indigenous Knowledge painted by the Lakota artist Danielle SeeWalker.

"I wanted the mural to be tied to engineering in some type of way since it'll be installed in the engineering building. This is all about Native people using our ancient knowledge—much of it coming from our star knowledge—to envision our future in an innovative way."
~Danielle SeeWalker

This mural is just outside the BOLD Center in the Engineering Center. You can also visit another of Danielle's murals at the front entrance of the Engineering Center.
Support Danielle's work on her website and Instagram.

Website:
Instagram:

Pioneering a new form of mentorship for our Native & Indigenous students is no easy task! We couldn't have done it without the support of everyone listed below, who met weekly to plan extensively in the months leading up to our program's launch date.

dana stamo