An UMSON faculty mentor and a Conway Scholar mentee explore doctoral education options using an AI assistant tool.
The UMSON Conway Scholars Program, which covers a significant portion of in-state tuition and fees depending on a student's academic program, connects nursing students with faculty mentors who can provide guidance, encouragement, and support throughout their education.
Through the Conway Scholars program, Daniel Adekunle, MS, a student in the Master of Science in Nursing Entry-into-Nursing program, was matched with faculty mentor Cory Stephens, DNP, Cert ’24, RN, CNE, NI-BC, CPHIMS, FHIMSS, assistant professor. Their mentoring relationship created an opportunity not only to support Adekunle’s academic and professional development, but also to explore how emerging artificial intelligence (AI) tools might strengthen faculty mentoring.
Stephens designed and developed the Doctoral Pathway Navigator, a generative AI assistant that helps nursing students explore doctoral education options, reflect on their goals, compare potential pathways to doctoral degrees, and develop questions for discussion with a faculty mentor. The Navigator was modeled after the JAIMIE framework (Stephens & Seckman, 2026), which uses AI and retrieval augmented generation to extend learning and support while keeping faculty expertise and human relationships centered.
Learn more about JAIMIE and the AI personas.
As part of his Conway mentoring, Adekunle used the Doctoral Pathway Navigator to explore his goals and prepare more focused questions. Rather than replacing faculty mentoring, the AI tool helped him arrive at conversations better prepared, allowing limited mentoring time to focus on individualized guidance, higher-level discussion, and decision-making.
The experience also provided Stephens and Adekunle with an opportunity to examine a broader question facing faculty mentors: Can generative AI extend meaningful mentoring beyond scheduled meetings while preserving the human relationship at its center?
The answer is yes. They documented their experience in Nurse Educator journal in a Teaching Tip article called “Using Generative AI Before, During, and After Faculty Mentoring.” In the article, Adekunle and Stephens describe an approach to using generative AI through the Navigator as a peri-mentoring support for both mentor and mentee.
The project reflects a broader body of AI innovation underway within UMSON’s Nursing Informatics program (Stephens et al., 2026), in which faculty and students are exploring how generative AI can support education, practice, and the nursing workforce.
For Adekunle and Stephens, that innovation began with something fundamental to the Conway Scholars program: a student and faculty mentor brought together through a relationship designed to support the student’s development. Their experience demonstrates how the Conway Scholars program can create opportunities not only for meaningful mentorship, but also for students to engage directly with emerging innovations and contribute to scholarship that may help shape the future of nursing education.
References
Adekunle, D., & Stephens, C. (2026). Using generative AI before, during, and after faculty mentoring. Nurse Educator. https://doi.org/10.1097/NNE.0000000000002327
Stephens, C., Fisher, C. A., & Seckman, C. (2026). A generative AI virtual teaching assistant for graduate nursing informatics education: Design, implementation, and preliminary outcomes. Computers, Informatics, Nursing: CIN, 44(5). https://doi.org/10.1097/CIN.0000000000001411
Stephens, C. & Seckman, C. (2026). Live with JAIMIE: The virtual teaching assistant framework powering new AI personas. Summer Institute in Nursing Informatics (SINI) 2026. Baltimore, MD, July 16-17, 2026.