The Practice of Mentoring Scientists

00:00:16;10 When you ask scientists how they got to where they are in their careers
00:00:20;28 many of them will talk about a special mentor who helped them
00:00:25;12 through some difficult phase of either their education or their career.
00:00:31;14 And so mentoring turns out to be one of the most important things that we do as scientists
00:00:37;11 in order to make sure that there's a next generation of scientists.
00:00:41;06 And yet, we don't really talk about the nature of mentoring
00:00:44;24 or the practice of mentoring explicitly, especially when we're training new scientists.
00:00:51;15 So, when my HHMI program started, a few years ago, to study education
00:00:58;15 and how we train the next generation,
00:01:01;08 we talked about mentoring because we kept hearing from both senior and junior colleagues
00:01:07;15 that the mentoring that either they received or were giving
00:01:12;18 was a very important part of their relationships with other scientists.
00:01:17;19 And so, we began to think about ways that we could help mentoring be better
00:01:22;00 because many of the graduate students we talked to complained about their mentoring,
00:01:26;29 and they felt that their mentors could be more effective.
00:01:29;27 And so we thought, "Well, maybe there's a way to train mentors
00:01:33;25 so that they would be more effective."
00:01:36;05 We thought about mentoring in a very general way:
00:01:39;06 as the process of using one's experience and the opportunities that have been offered to us
00:01:45;11 to help someone else move along the pathway of a scientific career.
00:01:52;11 And so it doesn't have very much more specificity than that,
00:01:56;27 but just the process of helping, guiding, advising, encouraging, all of those are aspects of good mentoring.
00:02:05;16 So we began to talk to what we thought were great mentors,
00:02:09;23 professors who had a reputation for being terrific mentors.
00:02:14;13 Their students and their colleagues would rave about the mentoring they did.
00:02:18;10 And we interviewed them about how they learned to mentor.
00:02:22;13 And just about every single one of them said the same thing,
00:02:25;21 that they learned to mentor by making mistakes and making more mistakes
00:02:30;20 and making even more mistakes.
00:02:32;08 And most of them said even after 20 or 30 or 40 years of mentoring they felt they were still making mistakes
00:02:39;14 because every situation in mentoring was somewhat new.
00:02:43;16 Well, we went away and scratched our heads and said, "That just doesn't sound very efficient."
00:02:48;26 For people to learn simply by trial and error seemed a little bit unnecessary.
00:02:55;13 It seemed there must be some principles or ways
00:02:58;07 that we could teach people to be better mentors
00:03:01;20 because in fact, even though the mentors all said that every mentoring situation is different,
00:03:06;09 and that's true because every person is different,
00:03:08;14 we know from being scientists that we do have mechanisms for thinking about problems
00:03:15;04 and solving them even though we may never have seen that problem before.
00:03:19;07 Every time a scientists gets a new result, or gets a surprise in the lab,
00:03:24;27 that science doesn't come out the way we expect,
00:03:27;21 we are by definition dealing with a new situation and new information that we've never dealt with before.
00:03:34;29 But our training has provided us with a process, a systematic way
00:03:40;20 of taking problems apart and putting information together and analyzing and solving our problems.
00:03:47;21 So we thought, perhaps there's the same kind of process that,
00:03:51;24 while we couldn't anticipate every situation that any mentor would meet,
00:03:56;19 might give them the tools or a structured systematic way of thinking
00:04:02;25 about mentoring and analyzing problems that would make it a little bit more familiar
00:04:07;22 and little bit less based on trial and error as we heard from the senior mentors.
00:04:13;04 So we ran a seminar with graduate students and professors,
00:04:17;14 and it was interesting to watch them interact and talk about both sides of mentoring relationship.
00:04:24;00 And what emerged were a set of principles that told us
00:04:28;21 that there are definitely themes in mentoring,
00:04:31;23 and even though one has to be ready for every kind of different situation,
00:04:37;18 and in fact we're probably never really ready for all the situations we face,
00:04:42;22 we can at least have a few principles that guide us in our mentoring relationships.
00:04:47;29 And we can use them almost as a check list.
00:04:50;06 Some of the elements that we heard over and over were the importance of
00:04:55;06 listening, of asking questions, of knowing the expectations of your mentee
00:05:01;26 and making sure that they have expectations of you that they've shared,
00:05:07;29 and you have expectations of them that you've shared with them.
00:05:11;16 That's really important because we found that many relationships faltered
00:05:15;23 because of unmet expectations on one side or another, and we discovered that mentors
00:05:22;00 had simply never initiated a conversation about what their expectations were
00:05:26;21 and what their students' expectations were.
00:05:28;22 We also found that a common feature of all mentoring relationships was building independence.
00:05:34;28 And that seemed to make a lot of sense,
00:05:37;27 but most mentors said that they thought that it was important but had no idea how they accomplished it.
00:05:44;04 So we developed a set of principles,
00:05:47;21 and as we were developing them we realized that one theme
00:05:51;20 that ran through all of what we were doing was the reminder that our mentees are not us.
00:05:58;07 That mentors need to remember that they are not the reference point in the mentoring relationship.
00:06:03;28 Although their experience and their past may have some bearing
00:06:09;04 and certainly can help them advise in mentoring challenges,
00:06:13;03 their experience will never be exactly what their students' or mentees' experiences are.
00:06:19;13 And so it's really important for every mentor to remember that
00:06:24;06 we have to think from our mentee's standpoint,
00:06:27;14 think about their life goals, their values, their experiences,
00:06:32;11 what makes them tick as a person, and how we can help them
00:06:36;27 achieve their goals, their dreams in science, not ours.
00:06:42;27 I think that becomes even more important today as we see science diversifying.
00:06:48;11 The people in science have much more different backgrounds and experiences
00:06:53;20 than scientists of a generation ago who were much more uniform.
00:06:57;25 And as the older generation is mentoring a new generation of people,
00:07:02;23 who have quite different backgrounds and experiences, it will be even more important
00:07:07;08 for them to mentor by thinking about the person they're mentoring and not just about their own experience.
00:07:14;24 So, we hope that one of the future aspects of training scientists is training them to be good mentors
00:07:22;03 and treating mentoring just like one of the other skills that we teach,
00:07:26;00 such as scientific writing or thinking or experimental design
00:07:30;06 or statistics-any of the tools that we use when doing our science.
00:07:34;29 Well, mentoring is just one of those tools but it's probably the most important one that we use.

This Talk

Speaker: Jo Handelsman

Recorded: November 2011

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Talk Overview

Handelsman describes guidelines that she and her colleagues have developed to help scientists become better mentors. These include listening, asking questions, stating expectations and building independence. Good advice for scientists at all stages of their careers.

Speaker Bio

Jo Handelsman

Jo Handelsman is a Professor at Yale University and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor. She has implemented several programs to promote excellence in scientific teaching and she is the author of the books “Entering Mentoring” and “Scientific Teaching”. Continue Reading