Everything is Fine!: Rethinking Graduate Student Mentoring

Through a dramatized series of conversations between graduate students and their advisors, Everything is Fine!: Rethinking Graduate Student Mentoring explores the impact of structural and interpersonal issues on graduate student mentoring. To examine challenges related to mental health and mentoring across different identities, depicted scenarios include candid peer-to-peer discussions of personal and academic challenges as well as more formal advisor-mentee meetings. This piece also takes into account the additional challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic to graduate student mentoring. Audiences will engage with the performance by thinking through strategies to improve their interactions within advisee-mentee relationships via facilitated discussion.

**The theatrical portion of this session contains strong language and descriptions of challenges related to immigration status, mental health, race, political unrest, and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Objectives

In this session, participants will:

• Reflect on structural and interpersonal issues that create challenges in advisor-mentee relationships

• Explore specific strategies to alleviate the interpersonal challenges relating to mental health or mentoring across difference

• Consider how to apply these strategies to their own mentoring practices