Qualities That Mentors in the University Setting Should Have

Mentoring is gaining more and more attention as a way of enhancing the capabilities for the personal and professional development of graduate students. This paper revolves around the concept of mentoring and the particularities of its implementation in the University setting. The research focuses on the qualities that mentors should have in order to be successful in this task. It reviews the qualities that have been identified in previous studies and then compares them with the responses to a questionnaire that was sent in 2014 to 33 former graduate students that participated in a mentoring program between 2010 and 2013 at the School of Civil Engineering of the Polytechnic University of Madrid.