Special Events:
APPAM Communities: National Research Center for Hispanic Children & Families Mentoring Event
The proposed gathering is to form new connections and generate conversations between emerging scholars (e.g., graduate students, postdocs, and/or early career researchers) and established researchers/mentors to network and collaborate. This activity will provide a unique networking opportunity to the forty 2019 APPAM Equity and Inclusion Fellows, along with former fellows, and emerging scholars attending the conference. The Hispanic Center will build upon its experience in successfully coordinating mentoring events where attendees discuss mutual research interests, including those related to studying Hispanic children and families, as well as professional growth and development topics. The Hispanic Center’s multi-disciplinary work focuses on early care and education, healthy marriage and responsible fatherhood, and poverty and economic self-sufficiency thus it will draw individuals from diverse background and facilitate connections between individuals of diverse perspectives and training. Our group is uniquely positioned to provide a mentoring event that is consistent with APPAM’s commitment to engage practitioners and researchers from a wide range of perspectives, particularly those representing issues of diversity. In order to promote cross-disciplinary connections, we will group attendees based on topics related to key career trajectory points. For example, a cluster of attendees can focus on seeking internships as doctoral students, while another group focuses on preparing for a job search. Discussion questions will be distributed to support the active engagement amongst participants. By successfully recruiting APPAM conference attendees and strategically balancing the number of mentors and mentees within each topical area, we will create an environment that is conducive to building meaningful connections.
