Agendas for mentoring meetings
Agendas are gifts to you and your mentors. Agendas show that you respect them and the relationship enough to invest time in using it well. Agendas help you refine and prioritize your thinking, figure out your asks, and think about what your mentor needs to get their head back to thinking about your goals and projects.
Ideally, agendas are sent a day or two before a meeting and are short enough for the body of the email. If there are reading materials attached, send a week before and again two days before.
Now that I’ve become a mentor myself, I’ve realized what a gift it is when a mentee reminds me of their goals, their timelines, what we last discussed, and what they need from this meeting. I’m pretty organized and able to keep on top of many things, but the more projects and the more mentees I gather, the more help I need remembering salient details (either by my own efforts or by that of mentees managing up).
I’ve always kept structured agendas my own meetings with mentors, tailored to the preference of the mentor. Some like detail and volume, some like parsimony.
At various times over the years, my agendas have doubled as project & career management tracking tools for myself (or more accurately, anxiety management tools), but inevitably those have spiralled out of control within a year and I’ve ultimately decided the effort was no longer meeting the needs of myself and my mentors.
My current 1-page agenda has the following headings:
Action items from last meeting (for both me and my mentor)
Wellbeing check-in (for both of us)
Questions/discussion points (I try to order by priority, and add to it as things occur to me between meetings)
FYI updates by project (since the last meeting) - I don’t include this for all mentors, but I do for senior authors of multiple projects or for my primary mentor
At other times in my career I’ve included my list of goals for the next 6 months or 2 years, with progress towards them. It’s probably a good practice to discuss broader goals with your main mentor(s), or career mentor(s) at least once a year, or quarterly, depending where you are and what kind of help/accountability you need.
In addition, and this is a note to myself as well as you, it’s prudent to periodically check with the mentor to see if the agenda and meeting style is working for their needs or if there is something you could tweak.