This book examines multiple aspects of mentoring relationships in academia through autoethnography and personal narratives. It emphasizes narratives from diverse populations, including first-generation college students, people of color, women, immigrants, those from intergenerational poverty, LGBTQIA2S+ people, and individuals with disabilities. The book identifies gaps in mentoring and offers strategies for closing them. It provides recommendations for potential mentees and discusses implications for professional development in academia.

Key areas of coverage include:

• Sociocultural and historical contexts of academic mentoring relationships.
• Qualities that make a successful academic mentor.
• Mentoring marginalized individuals in academia.
• Benefits of actively seeking and establishing academic mentor relationships.

Mentoring Relationships in Academia is a must-have resource for researchers, professors, graduate and undergraduate students as well as clinicians, therapists, and other professionals in developmental and clinical psychology, social work, public health, human development and family studies, arts and humanities, social sciences, and educational leadership, and all related STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics) disciplines.

Meenal Rana, Ph.D., has been teaching college students for the past fifteen years at three different institutions: Michigan State University, Brown University, and California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt. At Humboldt (since 2013), she teaches several classes in growth and development, methods of observation, professional development, children and stress, parent-child relationships, contemporary issues in child development, service learning, and field placement. Dr. Rana’s research interests include identity exploration/development, belongingness, and resilience among youth and college students. She enjoys working closely with her students whether it is through advising, mentoring, supervising field placements or engaging them in her research and advocacy projects.

Susan G. Bennett, Ph.D., began her teaching career as a middle school English teacher, and during the next fifty years has educated students as young as four through graduate students completing their doctoral dissertations. At both The University of Texas, Austin, and Humboldt State University (now California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt), Dr. Bennett has directed National Writing Project sites, taught courses, conducted research, and published in the areas of young adult and children’s literature, composition, writing theory and research, and secondary teaching methods in English. Her current interests include the role of mentorship in student success, resilience, and mental health.