Challenges for Mentorship Programs
Perhaps the most frequently encountered challenge for mentorship programs is ensuring that students meaningfully and regularly engage with their mentors. One remedy for this perennial problem is to have these engagements built into each course as assignments.
The other prime challenge for programs is maintaining the consistency of mentors throughout the program. Because some programs can span two years, many law student mentors will graduate before the Pathways students have completed their courses. The best remedy for these issues (which provides other benefits to the program and to the students) is to recruit law students who are 1Ls and 2Ls so they can work with the Pathways students for the full curriculum over two years.
Finally, the mentorship program presents challenges in maintaining sufficient participants. Relationships with local bar organizations can help to provide mentors for the program.
Program / Participant Descriptions
To reiterate the above, the following constituencies are fundamental to building fruitful mentoring programs:
- Pathway Mentor: A practitioner, ideally less than five years from graduation
- Pathway Fellow/Mentor: Law student (as above, preferably 1Ls and 2Ls), with the goal of past Pathway Scholars serving as mentors in later cohorts.
- One-on-One Mentoring: Cohorts 1, 2, and 3: two mentors (law student/lawyer) for each Pathway Scholar.
- Mentoring Teams: Consider future groupings of mentees on a "strength in numbers" theory with two or more mentees assigned to Law Student and Attorney mentors for a mentoring team or "pod" (with students more comfortable meeting with professionals and law students).
Students should complete a survey measuring the success of the mentor relationships at the end of each semester so the program can evaluate mentorship success and modify the mentor program to ensure positive, beneficial relationships. Ideally, all mentors will participate in hospitality events and meet monthly with student mentees.
Mentorship Program Outcomes
As with courses in the Pathway Program curriculum, the mentorship program itself also should have measurable outcomes. At the end of the Pathway Program, students should ideally have
- A network of professional relationships that supports the students’ entry into the profession;
- Growth and maturity from regular interactions with legal professionals;
- A sense of "belonging" in the profession;
- Increased sensitivity to cultural dynamics in the profession;
- A mature appreciation of respectful discussion and disagreement in intellectual endeavors;
- "Street smarts" regarding study strategies and skills, test preparation;
- An appreciation for the reality and honor in hard intellectual work; and
- The desire to "pay it forward" to future generations of Pathway candidates.
Students on the Pathway: Recruitment and Program Incentives
In addition to mentorship, the Program will hopefully include a number of features intended to integrate Pathway Scholars into the life of law school and the legal profession. These features are designed to complement the mentorship program, with mentors and scholars mixing in professional and law school settings to the extent possible. This is always a work-in-progress, with ideas for professional mixing developing continually and being implemented as new opportunities arise.
Hospitality Events
The program typically includes one or more hospitality events each semester. Events can include an evening opening reception to celebrate new Pathway Program students early in the semester. This event usually is held at the law school and should include many program faculty, mentors, and law school administration.
The second event can often be a mid-morning or lunch event at the law school held before finals with a smaller, more focused discussion than the opening reception, which is largely social in nature.
A challenge for all programs, but online or hybrid programs in particular, is ensuring robust attendance at all events. For example, the Mentee Engagement Survey indicated students had trouble attending events at the law school due to work, school, and family commitments. McKinney continued to determine how to rework these events to include their Pathways students. One idea is to partner with the local bar association or attorney mentor law firms to ensure that venues are appealing and convenient for Pathway students.
Recruitment and Cohorting
The process of recruitment and cohort-building has proven to be one of the most challenging aspects of the programs. With Pathway Programs usually housed in, and managed by, a law school, developing partnerships in pathway undergraduate schools and programs is essential, even if the law school is stand-alone. In addition, Pathway Program have relied on leadership in partner schools to provide program information on students and student progress, which has been unavailable to Pathway leadership through a combination of privacy laws and difficult-to-navigate institutional barriers to record-sharing. The law school and partner schools need to address these barriers in the development of the Pathway Program so that information can be collected for program evaluation and outcomes, as well as ongoing communication.
Students can be called "Pathways Scholars," and can be recruited as early as Freshman and Sophomore classes at participating undergraduate institutions. Information about the Pathway Program should be shared with undergraduate counseling teams and also can be shared among entering students with an interest in the legal profession, as well as with student pre-law affinity groups.
The program can be designed with the intention that cohorts would begin in the Spring Semester, ideally of Sophomore year, and finish courses in the Fall Semester of Senior year. Of course, this schedule would be modified for undergraduate schools on the quarter system and would depend on the funding and budget available for multiple-year programs.