Using Mentoring to Help Youths and Young Adults Across the STEMM Talent Development Pipeline: General Remarks and Two Best-Practice Examples

Abstract

The authors describe the potential of mentoring to serve as an adjuvant across the entire talent development pipeline in science， technology， engineering， mathematics， and medical sciences (STEMM). The authors note the considerable theoretical promise of mentoring and its oftentimes desultory empirical reality， outline hallmarks of effective mentoring， and describe the variegated mentoring roles needed over the course of talent development. The authors then flesh out what talent mentoring—done right—in STEMM looks like by introducing two best-practice online mentoring programs aimed at youths as they progress from novices to experts in their STEMM talent development. Finally, the noted hallmarks of effective mentoring are recapitulated with respect to the best-practice examples.