Mentor/Mentee Spotlight: The NORDP Mentoring Program in Five Questions featuring Karen Eck

 

Name: Karen Eck
Institution: Old Dominion University
Are you a Mentor? Mentee? Both? Mentor x 2
eck_karen
1. What influenced you to become a mentor or mentee?
I’ve been lucky to have some great mentors in my career but I also know what it’s like to feel a bit isolated in my work and looking for advice, support, and someone with whom to share ideas. NORDP’s Mentorship Program has been a great opportunity to connect with colleagues and provide an outlet for exchange to our mutual benefit.

2. What surprised you about being a mentor or mentee?
How easy it is to reach out and develop rapport with people you either don’t know at all or have met briefly at a NORDP conference. RD professionals have so much in common and this becomes apparent once you start talking! Common ground for us is easy to find and that’s the basis for any good conversation – or relationship.

3. How has participating in the NORDP mentoring program impacted your day-to-day work?
The insight I get about the reality of RD at other institutions helps me to think more strategically about my own. I look forward to the time I spend with my mentees. I learn so much from them; it’s a real exchange and I get as much as I give.

4. What is one way being in the mentoring program has helped increase or broaden your understanding of research development?
RD professionals play many different roles. It’s interesting to learn about other jobs, which may mirror your job responsibilities, but due to institutional size, history, geography, policy, politics, etc. require a different approach or different strategies.

5. What other thoughts would you like to share about the program?
We have not set goals for the relationship yet but we have a really good give-and-take. We compare our institutions and share stories. It doesn’t feel like a mentor-mentee relationship but more two colleagues getting together to mull things over. Our experiences are different but our level of expertise feels similar although in different areas.
__________

The NORDP Mentoring Program
The NORDP Mentoring Program offers a formalized pairing process to match a mentor and a mentee with similar professional interests and different levels of experience in order to frame a relationship that offers mutual guidance and support. Once pairs are matched, the mentoring process is an informal one based on the needs of each individual pair.

Posted on behalf of the Mentoring Committee

Mentee Spotlight: The NORDP Mentoring Program in Five Questions featuring Christina Papke

Name: Christina Papke
Institution: Texas A&M University
Are you a Mentor? Mentee? Both? Mentee

papke_2017

1. What influenced you to become a mentor or mentee?
I joined the program as a mentee because I wanted to receive feedback and advice from a research development professional outside of my institution. I felt this could be a great way of generating ideas and gaining different perspectives on how to best assist faculty with their grants. I was also interested in broadening my understanding of research development and how it is structured to meet the needs of faculty at other institutions.

2. What surprised you about being a mentor or mentee?
As a mentee, I was surprised – and pleased – to discover that there is a lot of flexibility in the program. Rather than being very formal and structured, it is up to each mentor-mentee pair to set agendas and decide what works best for them.

3. How has participating in the NORDP mentoring program impacted your day-to-day work?
Through interacting with my mentor, I have gained a number of ideas that I have been able to incorporate into programs, events, and meetings with faculty members. I also look forward to sharing my ideas and gaining feedback on how to refine and improve them.

4. What is one way being in the mentoring program has helped increase or broaden your understanding of research development?
I feel that I have gained a better appreciation for the services offered and structure of research development offices at other institutions. It has been fun to compare notes and see how our offices are both similar and different, and to use those notes to think about things that might be useful to suggest at my institution.

5. What other thoughts would you like to share about the program?
The NORDP Mentoring Program has been excellent! Hearing a perspective from someone outside my institution has allowed me to learn more broadly about research development. During our hour-long meeting each month, I enjoy asking questions, hearing about resources my mentor has found helpful, and exchanging ideas. I see the Mentoring Program as a great starting point for learning how to develop a professional network that includes multiple mentors with expertise in different areas, and also mentees as I grow in my experience.

NORDP Annual Conference Attendance Scholarships Includes Support for Diversity

 

NORDP is pleased to announce that we will offer a limited number of full and partial scholarships again this year for those with financial need who wish to attend our Annual Research Development Conference in Denver, Colorado, May 8 – 10.   In keeping with NORDP’s goals to increase overall membership and to encourage diversity, we are for the first time designating two scholarships for underrepresented racial and ethnic minority applicants, as well as giving priority to applications from new members and first-time Conference attendees.  It is expected that each applicant will approach his/her institution or organization to request co-funding to attend the Annual Conference.

Please watch for the availability of the Conference Attendance Scholarship Application on the NORDP website soon.  The deadline for applications will be February 13.

Mentoring comes in all shapes and sizes

Have you ever been influenced by someone and chances are that person never even knew their impact on you?

During the 2013 Annual NORDP meeting in Austin, TX I was invited to join a dinner group hosted by Ioannis Konstantinidis.  It turned out that the dinner group was full, but he told me to come anyway.  We walked a short distance to a restaurant and when we sat down at our table Ioannis told us about the rich history of the restaurant, Threadgills.  I love history, music, and stories so I was captivated: a country music lover, Kenneth Threadgill, opened a filling station in Austin, TX in the 1930s and was granted a beer license, making him the first person in the county with alcohol.  His filling station/tavern became a popular place for musicians who played in the area to grab a drink after their shows.  Threadgill loved people and found that music “smoothed out…conflicts that usually occurred when longhairs crossed paths with rednecks.” In the 1960s his establishment welcomed “folkies, hippies, and beatniks” to sing on Wednesday nights.  Janis Joplin is said to have developed her “brassy” style at Threadgills. (For more information on Threadgills, visit http://www.threadgills.com/history/).

Ioannis continued to host the dinner group as if we were all old friends and we shared stories and conflicts from our own universities. He gave the entire dinner group his business card and later via the NORDP website, asked me to join his professional NORDP network. Ioannis reached out to this professional network occasionally afterwards, which strengthened my commitment to participate in NORDP and give back. Research Development professionals may not be musicians, but it seems Threadgills is still a place where people can cross paths and share stories.

Because of Ioannis’ dinner invitation, I then attended one of the NORDP committee meetings during the meeting the next day, I later volunteered on a committee, I volunteer during our Annual meetings, I became a mentor, and now volunteer on various committees as well as serve on NORDP’s Board of Directors…with Ioannis. I emailed Ioannis recently to let him know how his kind gesture of allowing me to join his dinner group impacted how I view my NORDP membership and my growth in Research Development, he said he had no idea.

We all can have an impact on one another. Mentors can be formal or informal and may have influence on people they may never consider mentees.  I encourage you to reach out to your NORDP colleagues, whether through a dinner invitation at the next Annual Meeting or by becoming a mentor through the NORDP mentor program. For more information, visit http://www.nordp.com/mentoring-committee.

Karen Fletcher
NORDP Board Member
Mentor Committee Co-chair

Membership Drive Launches in 2017

Greeting from the Member Services Committee!

It is the time of year to reflect, connect and make a difference. As I look back over the many things for which I am thankful, being a member of such a great organization filled with generous peers and colleagues who willingly share their time and expertise definitely makes the list.a86a6025

As I speak to people from around the country, I am still surprised at how few have heard of NORDP. On the flip side, it is so rewarding to hear from new members who feel like they have finally found ‘their people’ and professional organization home. NORDP enjoys high attendance (~60%) of members at our annual conferences. We expect this trend continues for the next conference in Denver, Colorado on May 8-10, 2017.

This year, at the leadership retreat of the Board, we agreed the time has come to take active measures to increase NORDP’s profile nationally. One strategy to accomplish this is a membership drive. To that end, we have set a goal of attracting 100 new members by the end of our fiscal year on September 30, 2017.

As with many initiatives, grassroots efforts are powerful. You will start seeing regular posts with small ‘calls to action’ of little things each of us can do to raise awareness and refer new members. Since the new year lends itself so well to re-connecting, we hope that you will mention NORDP to peers and colleagues.

In the meantime, we are ramping up activity on our social media outlets and encourage you to join, and invite others to join, the LinkedIn group and subscribe to our Twitter feed.

Happy 2017!

Terri Soelberg
NORDP Board Member
Member Services co-Chair

Announcing NORDP’s Inaugural Membership Drive Campaign

 

by Terri Soelberg

Greeting from the Member Services Committee!

It is the time of year to reflect, connect and make a difference. As I look back over the many things for which I am thankful, being a member of such a great organization filled with generous peers and colleagues who willingly share their time and expertise definitely makes the list.

As I speak to people from around the country, I am still surprised at how few have heard of NORDP. On the flip side of that, it is so rewarding to hear from new members who feel like they have finally found ‘their people’ and professional organization home. This is certainly supported by the fact that we have such a high attendance of the membership at our conferences. We are certainly hoping this trend continues for the upcoming conference in Denver next year.

This year, at the leadership retreat of the Board, we agreed the time has come to take active measures to increase NORDP’s profile nationally. One strategy to accomplish this is a membership drive. To that end, we have set a goal of attracting 100 new members.

As with many initiatives, grassroots efforts are powerful. You will start seeing regular posts with small ‘calls to action’ of little things each of us can do to raise awareness and refer new members. Since the holiday season lends itself so well to re-connecting, we hope that you will mention NORDP to peers and colleagues.

In the meantime, we are ramping up activity on our social media outlets and encourage you to join, and invite others to join, the LinkedIn group and subscribe to our Twitter feed.

Wishing you a safe and happy holiday season!

‘Holidays’: codeword for “taking care of a bunch of backburner tasks”

A message from NORDP President, Gretchen Kiser  

The holidays are officially upon us and they are always this strange time of year where we are expected to simultaneously slow down, reflect, assess, and count our blessings AND rush around to take care of a myriad of personal and work activities and tasks in time for __________ (grant deadlines, year end, Santa, Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, New Year’s Eve, Festivus, etc.) .  Rather than lament, I’m going to embrace the duality of the season and roll with it.

One of the goals that came out of our annual Board retreat in September was to plan and implement our first ever membership drive.  Under the keen guidance of co-chairs Terri Soelberg and Kayla Tindle, the Member Services committee has a carefully considered plan and will be rolling it out in the next month or so.  Please take note when you see it and help spread the word to potential new members!

Remember: December 19th is the submission deadline for 2017 conference abstracts. One of the strongest values of NORDP is the sharing of methods, best practices, tool applications, and strategies. Our conference is the most efficient avenue for this sharing and so we encourage everyone to submit a poster or oral presentation idea for potential inclusion.

The conference hotel reservation link and the 2017 conference registration fee schedule are now posted on the NORDP website, along with links to apply for travel scholarships. Check it out!

2017 Conference Plans and Other Activities

A message from your NORDP President:

It is especially important during this time of uncertainty that we all remain focused and committed to our professional efforts to effectively support and advance the research enterprise at our own institutions and broadly.  We are working to maintain and build NORDP as the go-to resource and community for your research development needs.  Right now we’re working on several goals, including planning the conference and nurturing our strategic alliances.

Always high on the list of activities for the organization is our conference planning.  We are in full-swing of planning an effective conference in Denver around the theme, “Creating Research Excellence through Strategic Research Development”.  For those that don’t know, our NORDP 2017 Conference Co-Chairs are Michael Spires (University of Colorado Boulder), Kellie Dyslin (Northern Illinois University), and Karen Eck (Old Dominion University).  We are definitely taking into account feedback that attendees gave on last year’s conference but if you have some input you’d like to give, please reach out to Michael Spires at rdconf@nordp.org.

In addition to the EPPD committee changes that I mentioned in September, our new Strategic Alliances committee (a refresh of the previous External Engagement committee) is working to further engage critical partners outside of NORDP and expand our sphere of influence and bring new and valuable resources to our membership.  For example, since corporate relationships are often a part of our research development efforts, Strategic Alliances has reached out to NACRO (Network of Academic Corporate Relations Officers), inviting them to network with us at the Denver conference, where we also plan to have content that will be valuable to both NORDP and NACRO members.

Hopefully you’ve all seen the call for abstract that went out last Monday.  If not, check it out at https://www.eiseverywhere.com/eselectv2/frontend/index/203635#44877.  Abstracts are due on December 19th.  As RD professionals, I know you all have an encyclopedia of strategies, ideas, practices, and tools that could benefit your colleagues and contribute broadly to research excellence.  I challenge you to reach out to collaborators near and far to develop conference presentation ideas.  We’re looking forward to seeing some great ideas for talks and posters!

Who said July and August were slow months? An update from NORDP President Gretchen Kiser

by Gretchen Kiser

I had wanted to dedicate some substantive time to writing my first post to you all, my valued colleagues in research development, to say something prophetic and inspiring for my first blog post.  Alas, I must tell you, at the risk of revealing too much, that my “The first month or so” blog post has now become “Who said July and August were slow months?” blog post.  This is the life of a research development professional.

I hope you will forgive this delay, especially as I tell you that your Board has not been at all idle. Here’s some of the things we’ve been working on over July and part of August:

  • On-boarding Keith Osterhage, our new Executive Director, who is an enthusiastic advocate for our goals, and has already been diving right in to help with several important tasks!
  • Working with our event planners, Designing Events, and our Executive Director to vet and select our conference venue in the DC area for 2018. We’re close to making a decision.
  • Goal-setting and planning. Board member Terri Soelberg and her university Boise State University generously hosted our Board leadership meeting at the end of August. In preparing for this meeting, I had the privilege of speaking individually with each Board member and will just say that NORDP is well-served by a diverse set of insightful and dedicated professionals.  As a means of understanding the strengths of ourselves as a Board and how to best work with each other, we utilized the StrengthsFinder tool to assess our individual professional strengths.  Not surprisingly, collectively we have a lot of strength in the tool categories of Learner, Strategic, Relator, and Achiever.

We tackled quite a few topics in our 2 days in Boise and I look forward to working together to execute our ambitious strategies to: realize our academic RD research arm (aka NORD), enhance and expand our professional development offerings, including into leadership development (LDRD), drive new sources of revenue, further engage critical partners outside of NORDP, thus expanding our sphere of influence and bringing new and valuable resources to our membership, work to implement more effective communication methods, develop a framework for regional and other affinity groups within NORDP, and define ways to help increase diversity in research development.  Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll focus a set of communications on a few of the topics that we discussed at the leadership retreat and hope to then give you all a good understanding of the direction that we’d like to take NORDP this year.

Let me start with some of the changes that we’re planning for the Effective Practices and Professional Development (EPPD) Committee.  Three very important programs have been nurtured under the EPPD umbrella: Online Professional Development, Mentoring and Pre-Conference Workshops.  As we pivot to further expand our professional development resources, we are going to pull ‘professional development’ into its own committee.  The new Program Development Committee will be focused on online as well as other professional development resources, and now including Leadership Development in Research Development (LDRD) content as well. Kari Whittenberger-Keith and Ioannis Konstantinidis will be the Board co-chairs of this committee.  The newly stand-alone Mentoring Committee will continue the fantastic work they have been doing now with Karen Fletcher serving as the Board representative for that committee.  Finally, the Pre-Conference Workshop group (still led by Kari Whittenberger-Keith) will slide over to sit under the Conference Committee, headed this year by Michael Spires.

I’m so excited about working together to meet the challenges and potentials for NORDP over the next year –  setting-up NORDP for organizational success and providing our membership with valuable resources for career development and doing their jobs more effectively.

NORDP 2016 Conference Notes: Empowering women leaders in research through alternative pathways

This post is part of our NORDP 2016 Conference Reports. These reports capture the take-home points from a variety of sessions presented at the NORDP Annual Meeting in Orlando.

Empowering women leaders in research through alternative pathways

Presenters: Alicia Knoedler
Key points from the session:
  1. About 74 – 76% of NORDP members are women.
  2. Leadership Development in Research Development (LDRD) – The skills developed from RD activities qualify RD professionals for leadership roles within higher education institutions and/or within NORDP.
  3. As an RD professional, you are already following the 5 tenets of leadership as defined by Ron Heifetz (these are listed in the session’s Powerpoint presentation).
  4. To be successful in RD today, you must be entrepreneurial, creative, innovative, and not afraid to take risks.
  5. NORDP will work to identify the broad base of skills/ ideas/needs for LDRD. The question of how we, as a professional organization, can empower RD leaders was discussed.
What resources did you discover at this presentation?
“Dispatches from 20 North Wacker”
A white paper that outlines the concepts and missions of both NORD (New Opportunities for Research Development) and LDRD. (You must be a NORDP member to access this document.)
What else from this session should NORDP members know?
  • It’s not always the RD professional who gets the recognition; RD professionals often lead in the background – working with faculty leaders.
  • Potential next steps were discussed: NORDP could have leadership development cohorts within their LDRD programming. A NORDP curriculum for leadership development could be advanced. The organization could promote leadership development opportunities within the NORDP community – best practices – annotated experiences.

If you are interested in joining the discussion on LDRD, let Alicia know.