Why Does Mentoring End?

Mentoring often implies an apprentice-expert relationship, but mentoring can and should take many forms. This paper describes a horizontal mentoring alliance of five senior women physics faculty from small liberal arts colleges supported through the NSF-ADVANCE (PAID) project. After a brief review of the literature on the value of mentoring, this paper describes the unique challenges and demands of senior women scientists at liberal arts institutions and the ways in which this particular alliance helped the members successfully navigate a variety of professional and personal issues. It highlights the way in which the alliance was instrumental in strengthening each member's professional research whether it was an extension of current work or changing to a new sub-field. Through the experiences of the alliance members, this paper argues for sustaining and propagating similar networks and suggests some initial steps to accomplish this.