Editorial

This issue of Mentoring & Tutoring: Partnership in Learning Journal includes research from scholars across the nation (Illinois, Massachusetts, Ohio, and Virginia) and the world (Sweden). The authors present work involving the benefits of mentoring programs and relationships across many arenas of higher education and training programs. These works include topics such as mentoring satisfaction in college women who are mentoring youth, the logistics of developing a mentoring program within a college, peer-to-peer mentoring relationships and benefits, and the use of mentoring as a tool for socialization in academe. Mentorship can be valuable for university-level students who are seeking to experience personal and professional growth. For students, the mentoring relationship is critical to the development of communication, relationship, and critical thinking skills. Mentorship allows students to explore their professional goals and interests and fosters the development of a professional identity. Student to faculty interaction, contact, and relationships help students feel connected to the university, their specific academic program, and develop a higher level of self-confidence in their abilities. Having this higher level of self-confidence contributes to overall success and the student’s ability to discover who he or she is as a professional and engage in self-reflexivity. Greater selfconfidence themselves and their skills, facilitates more student engagement in interpersonal reflection (Koro-Ljungberg & Hayes, 2006). Mentorship for new faculty also serves an important role within the university system. For faculty, mentorship centered on navigating and understanding the tenure and promotion process plays a key role in the mentoring relationship. Many universities across the U.S. are fostering the development and continuation of a mentoring culture in academe. At the university level, mentoring occurs both formally and informally. Formal mentoring programs are being used as a means to connect students with peer or faculty mentors in order to provide support and professional development. Universities are using formal mentoring programs that encourage personal connections between the mentor and mentee. These universities and programs are facilitating the careful and purposeful selection of mentors to mentees and are reporting success (Bell & Treleaven, 2011). With higher education, informal mentoring relationships frequently occur when the mentee reaches out to the mentor for guidance, feedback, or support due to a personal connection or knowledge about the professional field. Often times, mentors at the university level will agree to be a student’s mentor, many do not feel prepared and are given little information or training about being an effective mentor (Brown, Daly, & Leong, 2009). As the academic world continues to encourage the mentoring culture in higher education, more training and research is needed to fully prepare faculty mentors and students about the roles and responsibilities of each in order to create and sustain positive mentoring relationships. In the lead article, Initial Characteristics and Mentoring Satisfaction of College Women Mentoring Youth: Implications for Training, Foukal, Lawrence, and Williams