Mentoring Students as a Professional Development Opportunity: Reflections of Early Career Dental Faculty

Mentoring oral health students as a faculty mentor potentially yields numerous benefits for the mentor's professional development, and very little is known about the role mentoring plays in the professional development of early career faculty. This program's aim was to explore the impact of mentoring oral health students on the professional development of seven early-career dental faculty members.

Seven early-career faculty members were engaged as mentors to provide additional support to oral health students. Throughout the mentoring programme, each faculty mentor reflected on their experience and on completion met to discuss experiences. By exploring the reflective data, the common themes from the programme were identified.

The faculty were unfamiliar with providing academic mentoring for students and learned to develop important personal qualities such as openness and patience. Faculty identified a sense of 'imposter syndrome' in their role as new faculty and experienced conflicting feelings: guilt associated with time pressures, lack of perceived usefulness, and pride and satisfaction from the rewarding experience.

It appears that mentoring students can support faculty development, feasibly translating into improved teaching abilities and enhanced interpersonal competencies. Early-career faculty identified further opportunities for faculty development, focused mostly on student wellbeing and study strategies.

The mentoring program demonstrated that supporting early-career oral health faculty helped facilitate their transition from clinical practice to academia. By providing a structured environment for growth and reflective practice, the program significantly contributed to the mentors' professional development.