Mentorship Champion Dr. Maria Cuzzo

At Mentor Collective, we believe the secret to student and professional success is relationships. Connecting people to your network keeps it active and, most importantly, helps others gain access to the people, ideas, and opportunities that challenge old ways of thinking and make room for innovation.

Our work gives us the opportunity to interact with the academics, leaders, and administrators who work tirelessly to understand and improve student outcomes through mentorship. They go by many identities but have one thing in common – the desire to make an impact by challenging the way we think about higher education and the student experience. 

We call them Mentorship Champions.

This month we’re pleased to announce our Mentorship Champion as Dr. Maria Cuzzo.

Dr. Maria Cuzzo has served for decades as a proud fully ranked and tenured faculty member at UW-Superior, a former instructional academic staff member and was the longstanding program coordinator for the Legal Studies and Criminal Justice Program, one of the largest programs at the university. During these years, she also served eight years in a partial administrative reassignment to found and direct the newly created Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL). She was also the co-facilitator (with Ms. Jenice Meyer) of the accreditation process with the Higher Learning Commission for three years to a successful conclusion. Maria has a deep devotion and love for the growth and development of students. She is an educator at heart and is honored to serve as an educator-administrator to support UW-Superior’s students, faculty, staff and region.

In reimagining UW-Superior's student success strategy, Dr. Cuzzo recognized the importance of peer connections in developing sense of belonging, a critical factor in the likelihood of student persistence in higher education. Within the scaffolding of holistic support, she emphasized peer mentorship as the string that's able to align the vast array of campus services and resources. She is also a champion for leveraging technology for good, and not simply to have a robust tech stack. We were excited to welcome her and her colleague Megan Torkildson for a webinar in 2023 discussing the marriage of predictive analytics and the Mentor Collective mentorship platform.

Dr. Cuzzo has served as a mediator for Douglas County Court Commissioner’s Office, Assistant Professor/Lecturer/Teaching Specialist within the Department of Political Science at the University of Minnesota Duluth, had a teaching/research assistantship with the Department of Political Science at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities and served as an Associate Attorney at WEIBY, MAKI, DURST, LEDIN & BICK, S.C. in Superior, WI.

Mentor Collective is honored to acknowledge these contributions and the many more that make Dr. Cuzzo a true champion for mentorship and student success.

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In addition to discussing how both mentors and mentees can show up within a mentorship, Dr. Cuzzo and Mentor Collective’s Director of Marketing Campaigns Alexandria Glaize talk about the use of mentorship as a means of building critical soft skills and using it as a doorway to have transformative conversations.

Listen to Dr. Cuzzo's Interview Below or Read the Transcript Below Each Question:

What Does Mentorship Mean to You? |  What Advice Would You Give Someone Looking For a Mentor (or Looking to Make the Most of Mentorship)

How Has the Power of Mentorship Shown Up in Your Life? | Why Do You Champion Mentorship?

Alexandria Glaize (AG): What does mentorship mean to you?

Dr. Maria Cuzzo (MC):  You know, Alex, I've thought about this since I saw the question and the formal definition I like to give to people is mentorship is a mutually beneficial relationship of trust and care between a mentor and a mentee that is designed to grow both parties. When I think about the mentor part of it, with a good mentor, they are offering their knowledge skills, abilities, and experience, and I always hope wisdom, too. They help share key insights, observations, supports, and advice if requested by their mentee. So the mentor brings all of that richness to the relationship.

Now, the mentee, on the other hand, is the one seeking knowledge, skills, experience, advice, of the mentor to achieve their own life goals. What makes this so mutual is the mentor has to understand that it's the life goals or success goals of the student that need to be at the center of that relationship, and the mentee needs to understand that they are seeking a mentor for particular reasons that have to do with the specialness of that particular person.

So that's where the beauty of mutuality comes in. And the final thing I would say about, you know, what mentorship means to me is in my experiences with mentorship, which are many, many over the years. I always hope both parties are committed to having a real open-minded growth experience that at its best is transformative...for both of them, but for sure the mentee...and at its minimum, is still a passage of knowledge, wisdom, and advice that can hopefully benefit the mentee.

Alexandria Glaize (AG):  There are a couple of things you said that really struck me, and I appreciate you kicking off your your response to this question by highlighting that it's designed to grow both parties. Traditionally, when we think of the mentoring relationship, we're always looking at it through the lens of how does this benefit the mentee, but I think the key to success is understanding that there has to be some reciprocation, and there's a humbling that happens when you're the mentor and recognizing that there is something that I can learn from my mentee. 

I hope folks are taking note of that piece of it, and as you said "the beauty of mutuality." I think that is the perfect kind of phrase to describe it. I think the second piece of this is that the hope is that it's a transformative experience for both parties. And then at the minimum...the bare minimum, is a sharing of knowledge, is a sharing of insights. I think that challenges us all to ask "how do I move away from the bare minimum and ensure that I'm entering into this mentoring relationship with the intentionality that we're reaching for transformation?". That's where the real work happens. That's where the beauty happens. That's when we move into a place where, especially for students, where we're saying this relationship is meant to expand access. It's meant to raise awareness. It's meant to connect you to resources that you may not have had otherwise. I think there is a beauty and asking how do I ensure that this is transformative?

MC: Yeah. All the items you mentioned are necessary and valuable transactional parts of a mentor relationship, but it is the spirit within which those transactions occur that is so important from my experience. Even while doing transactional help with the mentee, I always committed to being interested in the why's and the what's and really understanding who this person is and inviting them to ask me the same kind of input. There's no better way to get to transformation than exchanging one story and hearing it through one's own ears in the presence of a trusted other. So, yes, I believe there are a lot of transactional elements, most of which I put in the category of minimum expected. I mean, any good mentor worth their salt is going to be doing that kind of work, but the great mentors that exist and the great mentees, by the way, are the ones that are looking for that elevating experience, and that's more about relationship and that requires its own set of skills. 

AG: The spirit within which you do the transactional. That in and of itself is powerful...thinking about the why, the purpose. What I'm hearing is that support can go beyond the minimum of sharing just the transactional things. It extends beyond that, and there's a level of vulnerability in psychological safety. That has to happen in this relationship, and it can be reciprocated. In order to create that, the mentee is also able to stand in their power, and ask you the same questions.

I think that's really important, which I is actually a good segue to my next question. 

Alexandria Glaize (AG): What advice would you give to someone seeking a mentor or someone looking to make the most of their current mentorship?

Maria Cuzzo (MC): That's a really good question. And I think it's two parts. So I'm going to talk to each of them separately.

The first part is the advice you give to someone seeking a mentor. In the higher ed environment, this is often the student or a new employee to an organization. In any organization, it's generally somebody that is fairly new to the organization or seeking a new experience in a different way. So I think the first thing is that the mentee has to be aware of why they want a mentor to the best of their ability. The why is important here because that will in some ways determine the rules of the game between the mentee and the mentor.

By the same token, a mentor needs to know the why so that in the broad menu of knowledge skills abilities and experience that they can offer, they can then situate the things that will be the most relevant to the mentee. So that's number one. The mentee has to know why they want or need a mentor.

The second thing is I think is the mentee needs to think about the type relationship they would like. I have experienced all kinds of mentoring relationships in my career. Sometimes, and I'll just refer students as an example...

• Sometimes students are coming to me and all they want is transactional help. They're not interested in a deeper or more elevating experience. That's what they want, that's what they need. In that instance, I offer the transactional help to the best my ability, but I always keep the door open to them if they'd like to talk more, if they'd like to share their life story, if we should talk about opportunities that might be available to them. I always leave the door for them to ask for something more.
• Some mentees come to me, and they really are looking to form a relationship with somebody that can help them move forward on their academic or advanced education path or into the job market. That requires an exchange of knowledge at a different level. So it's important to mentor and mentee in the beginning understand what that would involve. Career preparation, advanced education preparation, is not merely transactional. There's a whole set of socialization and all kinds of other things that that should be exchanged.
• Some mentees come to me and they just want to have a powerful experience with somebody that they respect and that they're inspired by and they want to learn how it is that I as a mentor do that. Now that is more of the life story, the narrative, the connection.
• And once in a while, a mentee comes and they want the whole sha-bang.

So as a mentee, you have to get some clarity about what you want. Realizing that as the relationship naturally and organically evolves, you might look for more.

Now, the second part of the equation was wanting to make the most of a mentorship. This applies to both parties.

We've already talked about the mentee end of it. I would add to the mentee side that the mentee has to have some insight into how transparent and open they are willing to be. To me as a mentor, the mentee controls that. There's no rush that should ever be put on on that. You want to ask that, but the relationship is a big commitment. Relationships take time and energy. You have to work through things with each other. You're going to encounter difficulties. Sometimes for younger students in particular, they just never had the opportunity to form a relationship that wasn't family or wasn't romantic with somebody else for a different purpose.

So I think the mentee has got to be at least open-minded and willing to consider that this could be a meaningful relationship that's different from any other kind they've had.

Now for the mentor, I think the mentor has got to do a serious self-examination about how much time and energy they're willing to put into the mentorship relationship. The mentor has to have pre-decided how important mentorship is. For me, it was always behind high-quality teaching and learning. Mentorship was number two. And I had a lot of roles to practice it. I was a a mock trial coach for 26 years. I was an advisor to students. That's a formal transactional role, but I made it more.

I certainly was a senior faculty member that talked about futures and possibilities. So the mentor has be clear about their level of commitment. There's nothing worse in the world than for a mentee to take the risk to try to have a meaningful mentorship relationship only to discover that their mentor will not and does not make time for them. So I think those are some of the factors of the advice, that I would give. 

Alex Glaize (AG): First of all, great advice. I'm sitting here writing every single thing down because I'm thinking about this advice myself!

There are a couple of things that I wanna touch on that you mentioned. I want to reiterate what you said about it being okay to have a transactional mentoring relationship. Many times folks are often just looking for some transactional help that doesn't necessarily include, as you said, the narrative, the sharing of experiences. It more about looking for someone to take you from x to y or looking for someone to provide x, y, and z. 

I'm also connecting with what you just said about the mentor's responsibility to have a menu of options and the way in which they're looking to show up in a mentoring relationship. Presenting that so the mentee can say I'm looking for x, y, and z.

A critical piece of this is the evolution of mentorship broadly and within higher ed. Now mentorship is seen as a high-impact practice. It's something that's just now adopted in terms of formalizing it, but often the soft skills around being a mentor and a mentee are an afterthought. What you said before about learning these new relationship dynamics is important. There's often no intentional training how to be a good mentor and I would love for you to just touch on that briefly around the value of those soft skills that are required for these type of relationships to be successful.

I know I'm asking a question that I didn't have on my list, but this conversation really has me thinking about that gap.

Maria Cuzzo (MC): It's alright! This is one of our side trails, right? 

It's all good. It's all good. Here's my lived experience.

The evolution of mentorship. So I've been in higher ed either as a student or as and a faculty member first and now an administrator for going on over 36 years when I think of my full range of experience. When I was in college as a student, I identified certain instructors...faculty mostly in my academic programs, and then it was political science and religious studies and philosophy.

They were a combination of people who simply inspired me. They were a large part of the reason why I chose some of those majors and minors. It was because of their inspirational presence and the way that they conveyed information and the way that they knew what they were talking about, and frankly, their humanity.

There are a lot of high-quality instructors or faculty that are excellent as disciplinary experts, but their humanity doesn't come to us. So for me, I was always looking for that, because to form a relationship like that was a scary thing for me. I came from a very rural area in Central Minnesota, I hadn't had a lot of help with mentorship growing up. I regard my folks still as my primary early mentors in life, and I honor them to this day for the job that they did.

However, when it came to academic settings and trying to figure out a university and and having been far from home for the first time in my life, I was very scared and I was distrusting. That was what it was like as a student. I got lucky because I connected with a couple of those faculty members and staff members at the university that I found inspiring, and they took me under their wing. They did it in different ways. My political science professor, Dr. Peter Schotten, approached everything analytically and through the discipline, but he was a very caring individual, so I back-doored it into the kind of mentorship that I now intentionally seek to develop.

So through luck, more than anything, I had a range of mentorship opportunities, and they all changed my life. I look back to those people and what they did and what they taught me, what they drew out of me, how they asked me to stretch. They absolutely changed my life.

So then we fast-forward to law school. Now law school is a highly competitive environment. Today, it's getting much more touchy feeling, which I think is a wonderful thing, frankly, but in my day, you open law school with, "Look to your left, look to your right, in six months, one of you won't be there...". That was my introduction to law school.

Finding a mentor in law school was very, very difficult, but there was a third-year student who took an interest in me and gave me a lot of valuable critical advice about how as a student to survive law school. That was my first peer-to-peer, mentoring relationship. I also found a couple of additional professors, none of which formed deep relationships in the way I talk about, but they were transactional relationships and they were very good at what they did in that regard. 

Now you fast-forward to a PhD program. I loved my Ph.D. program, by the way. I know that's a sick statement to most people, but I absolutely loved those years of learning and just growing. I just grew so fast. I met several faculty members there who absolutely took me under their wing and helped polish me, helped me get ready for an academic setting in all respects and they cared about me.

So then I get into being a faculty member in a college setting, and I was bound and determined that I was going to find the crucial mix of all those experiences that I had had as one off's to figure out how I could really do a bang up job for a mentee. All along the way, there was no formal training. Nobody ever sat me down and said, "Hey, this is what mentorship is and does". I never had that conversation. Never heard about it in any of my intellectual preparation programs, law school, etc. In a law school, we should have been talking about how to form a client relationship. Ph.D. should have been talking about how to do student success. Zipo! 

So I think we've come a long way with our attempts to really raise out mentorship and knowing there's a skill set to it. 

AG: What I'm taking away from what you just shared is how you had these individual experiences and then they shaped how you now view and engage in mentorship. There's a piece of the peer-to-peer. There's a transactional. There's a transformative. There's the faculty aspect. Right? The inspirational type of relationships. So mentoring relationships can look like many different things, and there's room for that. The beauty is having multiple types of these relationships that are always connected to your why, and each relationship has a different why.

MC: Yes.

Well, I can tell you in the early days of my mentorship experience that was absolutely no language of soft skills. Nobody ever talked about things like that, and it was sort of this unwritten understanding that, well, some people are good at people, and some people are. That was that was kind of the viewpoint.

I can recall in my first career out of law school that soft skills just popped right into the radar very quickly because I was managing client relationships. And what I found is that if I were simply transactional attorney with a client, they walked away dissatisfied because they felt like they may have gotten a technical answer to their question about the law, but they didn't feel heard and they didn't feel like they were part of a dynamic.

I had to learn those skills the hard way. Now, I had some of those already in place, obviously. I mean, we all do to some extent or another, but I had to really intentionally think about how I would portray myself or interact with my clients in an effective way.

I was the first and only woman lawyer in Douglas County, Wisconsin, only the second in the northwest corner of the state of Wisconsin, and I was twenty four years old. So I just put all those things in place, right? 

AG: So many dynamics in that. Like, that in and of itself is like...

MC: It's a fabulous story.

Because I was a woman and a lawyer it was assumed that I would do family law. Now, I had zero interest in doing family law, but that was an area to grow an early practice and my firm wanted me to do it, so I did it. What I quickly learned after about the first three months of bringing in new clients was, many of them, not all, but many of them, came in with one of two assumptions about me. Not me, personally. They didn't know me at all, but the woman lawyer assumption.

One is that I would be "mother", that that was my role. Now that requires high soft skills. To pull off being "mother" when acting as an attorney, but that was the the the articulated phrase and the need. I would handhold people through some of the most horrible experiences of their life. I wasn't even a mother at that point in my life. That was a big thing to handle.

The other assumption was far worse, and that is that I would be "bitch on a leash". One of my clients actually used that phrase, and I just I couldn't be that. That's not who I am.

I thought out about how I could use my soft skills to correct misassumptions. I think that's one of the key parts of mentorship I've learned over the years. Everybody comes into these relationships with assumptions of one kind or another, and you have to call upon your toolkit of soft skills to figure out how to have not only a great dialogue, a visionary dialogue, the transactional dialogue, but also the hard dialogue. 

I always go back to that early experience as a young attorney, where nobody had taught soft skills, but it became very apparent to me that that was going to be a critical skill that I needed to develop quickly.

A good mentor challenges their mentee on occasion and some mentees want no part of thinking different, changing, opening up their mind to other things, and these are the hard parts of mentorship. That all requires very effective soft skills, and so I am very gratified today that there are actually mentorship training programs.

At my home university, I actually headed up our Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, and I brought mentorship training to our university about a decade and a half ago. That was thrilling to discover...that there were actual materials that could help a mentor think about their role in mentorship.

AG: I mean, Maria, you're just dropping so many nuggets of wisdom.

Using soft skills to combat misassumptions can be a whole dissertation. I think we all deal with having to navigate misassumptions, and to connect that to soft skills is really vital and important. The second piece of what you mentioned that I liked is understanding that mentoring relationships are a relationship. There are going to be hard conversations even amongst peers, and how do we help folks navigate those difficult conversations they would normally shy away from.

I know I'm always connecting it back to Mentor Collective, but it makes me think about the resources we provide students when they're part of one of our programs. One of those is a discussion guide on navigating difficult conversations. Another one is dedicated to goal setting. Having that support as a mentee or mentor is so important. I think it's wonderful that you're providing the training, the language, the toolkits for all of the things that show up in these types of relationships.

When you were talking about the value of client relationships and you said that it couldn't be just transactional. That is key to any type of relationship. It's feeling heard, it's feeling seen, it's feeling valued. 

MC: One thing I've noticed about that, and I appreciate that point very much, is good mentors today need to recognize they are living in a nested bowl of context. Part of that is recognizing that there are bigger goals that are part of ensuring things like student success, belonging. Belonging applies across any organization.

 
But any mentor has to learn that overarching set of objectives or goals that are very important to retention or recruitment into any organization or recruiting students, for example. For me, that was a huge shift. I went from thinking of mentorship as my realm alone with a student to thinking about me as a member of my organization, trying to help build a culture of belonging and access, and then linking back to me and how my actions could contribute to that for students. That's a massive shift which some people just don't make.

The best mentors are the ones who get that. They're part of something bigger than just their appointment book.

Alexandria Glaize (AG): How has the power of mentorship shown up in your life?

Maria Cuzzo (MC): I love this question, by the way, because you don't get many opportunities to sit down and really reflect.

I'll go back first to my family environment, because my parents were spectacular. They set expectations. They created safe conditions. They affirmed my value and my talent. They were there for me in really hard times. They created a sense of belonging within our family unit. That's often the very first experience that people have or sometimes sadly do not have in their early years. I had that.

Going into the school environment on the other hand was horrible. I was shy as all get out and very introverted. I wouldn't open my mouth for anything. It's ironic that I got into a high profile extroverted position, but if I'm still an introvert in my heart. I was afraid of not being good enough. I was afraid of not fitting in. There were a lot of rural dynamics. I mean, nothing as important as racism, but it was a very complicated environment.
I was mercilessly bullied for probably six years of my growing up years, and that was pre-bullying movement. I mean, nobody knew what to do about that stuff.

The first mentor that ever showed up was my, forensic coach in seventh grade. I was, doing a competition, Miss FHA. I mean, that just cracks me up now...Future Homemaker of America.

It's not the direction I ended up taking in life, obviously. I thought I had no talent, so I chose to recite poetry. Some of it my own, and some of it poetry that had just been in my family growing up. Sure enough...I won. One of the coaches that judged this event was the debate coach for junior high, John Charleston. I'll never forget him.

He came up to me after, and he said, you've got a skill. You've got a talent. I want you to go out for debate. I had no idea what he was talking about. It sounded really scary to me, but I did. That pathway for five years of my life: being coached, having mentors, and participating in an activity that terrified me, wound up with me being fourth place in the national competition in my senior year and winning everything in sight in the State of Minnesota.

Those coaches changed my life because they invested in me. They saw something in me that I didn't see. They brought it out. They encouraged me. They led me through the hard times. I mean, I will owe those two men for the rest of my life.

Then I went to college. I ran into Dr. Peter Shotton, a great political scientist. I did an intensive research project under his mentorship. We learned a lot about each other in that project. He's the one who helped me get to law school. Changed my life.

I get to law school. I run into other faculty members there who again brought out skills and encouraged certain things in me that I didn't think I could do in a law school setting. Changed my life.

I went into my legal career. I ran into elder mentors...all men, because, of course, I was the only woman.

But they were wonderful, and they helped me experience and experiment with the field of law. They also supported me when it became clear to me that I didn't want to spend the rest of my life doing that. Changed my life.

Went into a Ph.D. program. There were members in my program who convinced me I was good enough to earn a Ph.D. when I didn't think I was.
Changed my life. 

I went into teaching and had mentors here. They are now mostly retired, but they were people that I couldn't have lived without, as I tried to become a tenured track faculty member. Changed my life.

So the story for me is that mentorship from day one, has shown up as a powerful transformative experience across time and in multiple settings for different reasons. And that's why I'm so passionate about it. 

Alex Glaize (AG): I mean, that's a tagline right there. I've always believed that there is value in reflecting on how these type of relationships happened in our lives, because they are critical to how we see ourselves, to how we navigate spaces, to how we were supported on the multiple journeys that we all experience as human beings.

For me, it's often a reminder that these type of relationships are core to our humanity in the same way that familial relationships are, in the same way that romantic relationships are, and that this is core to the human experience.

There's a deep value and reverence that we should be applied to mentorship, because most of the times, we think it's a nice to have. But then we reflect on it, and we were like, these were critical.

How do we ensure that we are providing the structure so that everyone gets that same benefit of these transformative relationships in the same way that we would like folks to have beautiful friendships, in the same way that we would like to have great relationships with our colleagues. Mentorship deserves that same type of investment.

Alexandria Glaize (AG): Why do you champion mentorship?

Maria Cuzzo (MC): Well, first and foremost, because I've had those kinds of transformative experiences with mentors who I know changed my life and I believe that that can happen for a lot of people.

Don't get me wrong. There were a couple mentors along the way who were very problematic to me, but the vast majority just were amazing people who were giving their best and cared about me. So that's number one, my own lived experiences.

The second reason I want to champion mentorship is...in my current role as provost, I have some opportunities to select and support certain programs. To me, healthy peer mentorship programs, such as what Mentor Collective delivers is very key because it starts often as peer-to-peer. That's the easiest access point for many people because that's talking to someone that is closer to your particular place in life.

I also think good peer-to-peer programs require instruction and training and having diagnostics like Mentor Collective provides. So I want to be sure that there's a healthy peer-to-peer type mentor program at my university. More than that, I want to make sure that the mentors on campus are given the kinds of support they need to be able to intentionally reflect and actively engage in this activity of mentorship and be celebrated for the work that they do.

Just last week, I was at a campus-wide celebration of undergraduate research, and every project of 32 students had a mentor or two. We were all gathered together celebrating, and I couldn't help but look across that group of mentors, and feel proud at knowing what they put into that kind of work. I just thought "wow, what can we do to support and encourage these people in the work that they do?" Not just the students' really great research work, but our mentors. So I'm committed to trying to figure out how to do that better.

I also think that in my life experience, and what I hear from students who still keep in touch with me after 30 years, is that students don't remember what happened in a given class. What they remember is the impact that a special person have on them. They remember that. They remember how it made them feel. They remember the sense of how they grew. They associate that with a good time in their life, where they began to grow into themselves.

I think a mentorship opportunity of one type or another needs to be available to every student. 

Do you know someone who should be highlighted as one of our next Mentorship Champions? We'd love to know them, too!

Reach out to Alexandria Glaize at alexandria@mentorcollective.org to submit your nomination and help us uplift the work of extraordinary individuals.

Want to learn about previous Mentorship Champions? Check out our previous honorees below!

Mentorship Champion: Dr. Norris "EJ" Edney

Mentorship Champion: Dr. Charmaine Troy

Mentorship Champion: Dr. Lanze Thompson

Mentorship Champion: Dr. Lynn Breyfogle

Mentorship Champion: Dr. Donald Outing