Hulsey credits mentors for success in nursing
This is the first in a series of articles featuring talented and successful MUSC women and their thoughts on mentoring in the past, present and future.by Heather Woolwine
Public Relations
The poster hanging on Tara Hulsey’s office wall says in child-like
scrawl, “When I grow up, I wanna be a nurse,” next to an illustration of
a bright-eyed little girl.
Dr.
Tara Hulsey
“I remember seeing that poster when I was young and ever since then I’ve always wanted to be a nurse,” said Hulsey, Ph.D., R.N., College of Nursing associate professor and associate dean for faculty. “I have a helping personality so I suppose that’s why I never entertained another profession.”
True, Hulsey’s motivation from a young age and later determination and hard work would propel her to her current success, but is that all the professional recipe requires?
“I had the great experience of observing and learning from very successful and professional people, but not one mentor in particular,” Hulsey said. “I was never assigned a mentor in any aspect; instead I made more informal connections with a variety of people that I look up to. For instance, I look to our current dean for leadership and administrative mentor-ing, and for issues that deal with this position (associate dean for faculty). For me, being exposed to and observing what works for successful professionals in meetings, clinical care settings, etc. and then trying to emulate and incorporate those models into my own style is how I am mentored.”
A topic of great interest on campus these days, mentoring, for students, faculty, and staff, means many things to many people. To Hulsey, to really work for all involved, it must be a cross between an informal and formal process.
“At this point, I’ve chosen not to assign new faculty to one person upon their arrival because I feel like one mentor may not be capable of developing a person in every area of his or her career or life,” Hulsey said. “But I don’t believe the answer is to put everyone in a room without some kind of facilitation. It’s really been a challenge because true mentoring isn’t something that you can assign and my experience has been the more people you’re exposed to, the more developed you become. But my experience may not be the same as someone else’s and that’s why I struggle with how to do it for a large number of people.”
Hulsey did institute a buddy system of sorts for new faculty however, so that new members have a resource for job content (like how to develop a course in a specialty area) and one for scholarship (like grant writing). New faculty are also invited to participate in brown bag lunch discussions as part of a new faculty orientation.
But no matter how a mentoring relationship comes about, Hulsey believes it must be symbiotic; with both parties benefiting through working or helping one another.
“A mentor should be a coach, and both the mentor and the mentee are responsible for producing a desired outcome. As a mentor, it’s important to ask yourself if you are in a place where you can really give or help someone else or if you are only saying yes because you don’t want to say no,” Hulsey said. “There are so many topics to mentor on for students and faculty, it’s really going to depend on what type of relationship develops to determine if a more formal or informal situation is necessary. One mentor may be a close friend who helps you in all aspects of life and another valuable mentor may be someone who helps you strictly with professional development, like issues with tenure or how to ask for a promotion.”
If the mentor bears the weight of becoming a good life and/or career coach, then the pupil must be that player giving 100 percent to sharpen their game.
“Both people should make expectations known and then periodically evaluate those expectations to make sure they are getting what they need from each other,” Hulsey said. “If someone is receiving help from a mentor with getting a promotion, and then that person gets it and obtains an equal or higher rank of the mentor, the relationship might need to mature into more of a colleague situation.”
Not only is it important to understand what each person expects of another in a mentoring relationship, but it is also important that the two share basic interests and maybe even some of the same life challenges.
“There is an advantage to having a relationship with someone of the same gender because she has encountered the same challenges balancing career and family or the potential for gender inequities,” Hulsey said. “But that is not to say that having a mentor of a different gender from your own can’t be a wonderful experience and teach you how to handle diverse situations.”
A mentoring relationship isn’t much without a certain level of mutual interest in the beginning, and how well two individual personalities and characters will mesh is unpredictable at best. For a student, looking to an academic advisor may be a good place to start, while faculty members may enlist the help of a dean or department chair in connecting them to someone with similar interests or sought after expertise.
“Department chairs and admini-strators have a good handle on what individual faculty interests, workloads, and contracts are and should serve as the facilitators of mentoring relationships,” Hulsey said. “Regardless of whether relationships should be encouraged formally or informally, we as leaders haven’t done enough to provide new faculty and faculty in general with opportunities to get together and form either kind of relationship.”
Hulsey also mentioned the possible advantages of looking outside one’s discipline for a mentoring relationship.
“Observing other individuals and taking advantage of opportunities that match your expertise is a path to professional success,” she said. “Like a mentoring relationship, the opportunity and the person should complement each other.”
Born in Georgetown and raised in Orangeburg, Hulsey received her undergraduate degree in nursing from Clemson University and her master’s degree in maternal and child nursing from MUSC. In 1998 she earned her doctorate in nursing science from the University of South Carolina and has been with MUSC in some capacity since 1990.
The recipient of numerous academic and teaching awards, she conducted several studies related to her field and presented on related topics all over the country.
Hulsey participates in many university and college of nursing committees, including the university evaluation committee, the faculty senate governance committee, the university tenure committee and the university research council. Within the college she works on issues related to graduate and online curriculum, accreditation, faculty, and executive planning.
Her community service activities denote an individual committed to the overall good of the Lowcountry’s people with involvement as a victim’s advocate for My Sister’s House of Charleston, a member of the Junior League and other organizations dedicated to the improvement of pregnancy outcomes for the state.
Currently a mentor herself, Hulsey has participated in formal student
mentoring since 1992 at MUSC.
Friday, March 4, 2005
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