Scalable Career & Educational Growth Transitions: Developing a Mentoring Network & Engaging with an Online Mentoring Platform.

Abstract

The National Research Mentoring Network's (NRMN) goal is to increase diversity and provide mentoring, networking, and professional development resources to underrepresented populations in STEMM. The virtual, scalable MyNRMN platform includes 15,136 mentees, 7,998 mentors, 3,937 institutions, and 11,832 connections. Our goal was to understand mentee growth and "transitions" alongside engagement with mentoring and networking resources in MyNRMN. In this study, we define transition as the act of a person making a change to their MyNRMN profile that includes one of the following profile fields: institution, education level, degree, or career. We hypothesized that diverse networks and engagement in MyNRMN would be significantly associated with positive transitions. We assessed 7,209 user profiles that indicated an education/career change during the study period. Connections between racially homogenous users were associated with decreased positive transitions (b=-0.107, p<0.05). Connections with heterogeneous ethnicities were associated with increased positive transitions (b=0.105, p<0.05). Longevity within MyNRMN platform was associated with increased positive transitions (b=0.424, p<0.05).