What will faculty members be asked to do?

Your primary role as an SROP Faculty is to mentor an SROP Student on an independent research project. This will involve you or another member of your lab helping the student identify next steps and plan research tasks for the week. For the most part, we will leave faculty mentors to do their own thing. This is your profession; You know how to mentor inquisitive students! Moreover, we recognize and respect the diversity of methods, processes, and epistemology of our colleagues. So, while we will offer supporting materials to you and your lab members (e.g., time management worksheets to help the student plan each week), you are not required to use them. The mentorship component is purposefully open-ended so that you can fill it with whatever makes the most sense in the context of your research.

The SROP is structured to create a rich environment for the SROP Student. This means that faculty will not be solely responsible for their student’s experience. We view the SROP’s role as providing the support, structure, community, and content outside of the 18 hours/week they spend in your lab to ensure that all SROP Students feel enriched and included while they engage in research.

All that being said, here is an exhaustive list of time commitments that SROP Faculty will or may be asked to do, in addition to supervising an undergraduate research project for 8 weeks:

• The time it takes to write a project and mentorship statement for the faculty sign-up (est. 1 hour)
• Possibly you would be asked to review the applications, but you can decline and most people will not be asked to do this service
• If you are matched with an SROP Student, we will ask you to review their specific application to accept the match (est. 30 minutes)
• We will ask all matched faculty members to email their SROP student personally to welcome them prior to the start of the programme, but we will send you email templates and stuff to make that super easy! (est. 30 minutes) We do not expect you to meet with the SROP student before the programme starts; we intend to tell everyone to hold off on meetings until June 7 to respect everyone’s time and to avoid unwritten expectations or “hidden curriculum” processes.
• 2-hours of anti-racism training before the program starts (late April/early-mid May)
• Attending a 4-hour virtual conference the last week of the program (July)
• Completing a Faculty Programme Evaluation Form (est. 15 minutes)

The virtual conference will involve a keynote speaker and a datablitz session from all of our amazing SROP Students! We ask all faculty to attend, and we will advertise it more broadly to the UofT community.

The Faculty Programme Evaluation is very important to us, because we will be open to your feedback and ideas throughout the programme. We know we will not do everything right, so any advice you have for us will be very appreciated. In addition to evaluating the SROP itself, you will also be asked some common questions asked about students in letters of recommendation. At the end, you will be asked if you would be willing to write a letter of recommendation for the student. If you say, “Yes,” then we will (a) generate an automated draft for your letter, based on your responses to the preceding questions, that you can use as your starting place for your full letter of recommendation and (b) notify the student that you will write a letter for them.

We will update this post if there is any change. Otherwise, this is the complete list of things we will ask you to do if you sign up for the SROP!