A Comparative Study on Perception Regarding Mentorship between Mentees and Mentors in a Selected College, Mangalore

Introduction: Being a mentor is not an easy task.it is multifaceted responsibility of taking up teaching, counseling, guiding and supervising altogether. Availability of time, resources, personality traits, commitment, skill all need to be in sufficient amount and it should be accessible to the Mentee at any given time of the day. The relationship between Mentor and Mentee is like a two delicate end of a seesaw, a slight mismatch can lose its essence. “Mentors support the students in the clinical area & acts as a role model, facilitates the learning experience on placement1”. This investigation is an eye opener for the authorities to further strengthen the existing mentorship program for the well-being of the students. The objectives of the study were: 1) to compare the perception regarding mentorship between Mentees and Mentors. 2) to find the association between level of perception regarding mentorship and selected baseline characteristics of the Mentors and Mentees.\

Method and materials: The descriptive, comparative research design was used to compare the perception of the Mentors and Mentees towards mentorship. The sample consists of 193Mentees and their 18 Mentors. The entire Mentors population was taken for the study. The data were obtained by using a five- point rating scale. Out of total Mentees 91.7% were happy with their Mentors, and only a small proportion i.e. 8.3% were unhappy with their Mentors.The larger proportion i.e. 94.4% of Mentors were happy to be the part of the mentorship program. The overall 63.7% Mentees had a negative perception and 36.3% of Mentees had a positive perception, the Mentors’ negative perception is about 27.8% and 72.2% had a positive perception toward mentorship.

Conclusion: Mentors perception was better than Mentees.