ASTA Mentorship Award

Overview

The newly established ASTA Mentorship Award recognizes ASTA members who have made significant and sustained contributions to the career development of trainees and to the profession through outstanding mentoring. This award is based on the training experiences and success of the nominee’s mentees, not the mentor’s personal career achievements.

For the purpose of this award, mentoring is defined as the process of guiding, supporting, and promoting the training and career development of others. This award recognizes a scholar who has excelled at mentoring others in achieving their career objectives through moral, social, and intellectual support. Each of these criteria is defined as:

• Intellectual support: Helps the mentee develop ideas constructively (e.g., by brainstorming, offering a sounding board, suggesting a diverse perspective, providing written feedback) – investing one’s (scarce) intellectual capital in the service of mentees.
• Social support: Helps the mentee develop a professional network that will allow him/her to be successful (e.g. introducing them to others, writing reference letters, suggesting them as co-authors/reviewers/editors) – investing one’s (scarce) social capital in the service of mentees.
• Moral support: Genuinely cares about the well-being and development of the mentee (e.g. encouragement through difficult times, helps maintain self-efficacy, provides a perspective or specific career/work strategies) – investing one’s (scarce) mental energy in the service of mentees.

Eligibility

Nominees must be a current member of ASTA in good standing. Nominees must have made an outstanding contribution as a mentor. These contributions can be through a variety of channels or types of mentoring activities. Mentoring can be a one-to-one experience, or an individual can mentor a group.

Nomination

No more than three (3) mentees will write a supporting letter on how this person has impacted their development, career and lives to be submitted together by one of the mentees.

All nominations shall be in the form of a letter with the following information:

• Name, address, and business affiliation of nominee
• Tangible and specific information defining how, when, and to whom the nominee has demonstrated how mentees have been influenced to reach goals they may have otherwise not sought or been able to reach
• Nominees may include academic, government or industry members
• Self-nominations and posthumous nominations will not be accepted
• Candidates that were nominated in the preceding year but did not win the award are automatically reconsidered as eligible in the ensuing year

The winner of this award will be announced at the Awards Reception during the ASTA Leadership Summit.

Please nominate your mentors now as this award is actively recruiting candidates for consideration. Nominations can be sent to Ann Jorss at ajorss@betterseed.org.