Data From: Lighting pathways to success in STEM: A virtual Lab Meeting Program (LaMP) mutually benefits mentees and host labs

Developing robust professional networks can help shape the trajectories of early career scientists. Yet, historical inequities in STEM fields make access to these networks highly variable across academic programs, and senior academics often have little time for mentoring. Here, we illustrate the success of a Virtual Lab Meeting Program (LaMP). In this program, we matched students (“Mentees”) with a more experienced researcher (“Mentors”) from a research group. The Mentees then attended the Mentors’ lab meetings during the academic year with two lab meetings specifically dedicated to the Mentee’s professional development. Survey results indicate that Mentees expanded their knowledge of the hidden curriculum as well as their professional network, while only requiring a few extra hours of their Mentor’s time over eight months. In addition, host labs benefitted from Mentees sharing new perspectives and knowledge in lab meetings. The diversity of the Mentees was significantly higher than the..., Running the Virtual Lab Meeting Training Program
The first three months of the program require dedicated time for recruiting and matching Mentees and Mentors (for a summary of program timelines, see Figure 2). One month prior to the start of the academic year, we began to advertise the program by sharing a link to our webpage with potential mentors and mentees (https://rcn-ecs.github.io/VLMTP/; Figure 2). Then, we recruited mentors through a list of personal invitations, listservs, and members of the Evolution in Changing Seas RCN. We completed the process of recruiting 30-40 mentors approximately two weeks after the academic year started (Figure 2). Mentors were required to agree with a document that outlined expectations and best practices for including their Mentee in lab meetings (see Supplemental Materials).
After mentors were recruited, we began the process of recruiting student Mentees. We generated an email contact list to contact as many participants as possible across a divers..., , # Data From: Lighting pathways to success in STEM: A virtual Lab Meeting Program (LaMP) mutually benefits mentees and host labs

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.p2ngf1vzp](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.p2ngf1vzp)

## Description of the data and file structure

Metadata for Virtual Lab Meeting Training Program

Raw survey data is not provided to protect the anonymity of participants. Survey responses were summarized for each study question and those summaries are provided in the following data tables.

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### diversity-gender.txt

Description: This table summarizes the number of participants that self-identified with gender categories. Participants were allowed to select any that applied.

Columns:

* Category: gender category
* Mentor: number of Mentors that selected that category
* Mentee: number of Mentees that selected that category

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### diversity-race.txt

Description: This table summarizes the number of participants who self-identified with racial or ethnic groups. Part...