So you’re feeling nervous about mentoring your first student (regardless of whether they are a grad or undergrad). Well you’re not alone. Mentoring is difficult and requires patience on both ends. For yourself, you’ll need to adjust to work being a little slower. Instead of pipetting and moving on to the next thing you’ll need to explain why you’re pipetting and sometimes even show how to pipette. But this is all part of the job, and it makes it so much more satisfying when at the end of the semester or year you see your student not just pipetting but also starting to think of their own questions.
My goal as a mentor is to always put my students needs first and give them confidence to be an independent critical thinker. I ask them why they’re here and what they want to get out of the research for their own personal growth. Answers have ranged from I’m here to put research on my resume for med school to I am genuinely interested in research to I don’t know, I come from a family of PhDs so this is kind of expected from me. But until I know why the student is there and what they want, I can’t figure out the best way to mentor them.
I start out by explaining my research in a broad sense and then going into the finer details. Usually I do this through PowerPoint and gloss over all the data. That’s not important yet and I don’t want to overload them with information. Because it’s A LOT for someone who’s just starting.
When I’m starting a new experiment, I write out all the steps and why we’re doing certain things. I draw out diagrams and schematics of instrumentation This helps me make sure I won’t be surprised day of the experiment but lets the student know exactly what they’re doing and gives them the opportunity to ask thoughtful questions because when they’re doing the experiment it’s relearning and not learning for the first time.
You might feel like they’re asking really good questions that you don’t have the answers to. And that is absolutely okay. You are also learning. You can make educated guesses and tell them that’s what you think or you can say I’m not sure I’ll look into it and get back to you. Even if you feel inadequate saying you don’t know, that’s your imposter syndrome talking. You’ve been asked to mentor a student because your advisor believes in your abilities and trusts you. You don’t need to have all the answers and truly you never will. Don’t let it get to you.
Another thing that I do is let them try it out for themselves. I show them once or twice how it’s done and then tell them even if they mess up it’ll be fine, I just want you to try it. Because realistically unless it’s a very very urgent experiment, I can redo it or find a way to fix it. I don’t need the data that day. I’d rather them feel like they can try things without getting in trouble and that if they do mess up they’ll let me know instead of trying to hide the fact. The latter is especially harmful because if they don’t tell me when they mess up I won’t know. I try to watch them and keep conversation going but a lot of times it’s hard for them to focus on something new while talking or they get nervous by having someone staring over their shoulder.
After their second week I check in with them and ask them if they’re enjoying their time in the lab and if there’s anything that could be improved to make it easier for them. Because when things are easier for them, it’s easier for me as well. Speaking of this, I never ever ask my mentees to do things I wouldn’t do myself. If I’m not going to be in lab one day, I’ll ask them to work on something else that day.
I know this sounds like a lot of work, but it’s 100% worth it. I’ve directly mentored 5 undergraduates and 10 or so graduate students and they all end feeling very confident in their abilities. As for the undergrads they’ve all been able to have their own “independent” projects and have developed as exceptional critical thinkers. There’s a lot of data in my papers that would have been impossible to get without the work of my undergrads.
Again, this is just the way I mentor. There’s a lot of other mentorship styles and people mentor for a whole variety of reasons.
I guess the tl:dr: is just that:
- Things are going to be a bit slower
- You’ll need to explain the ins and outs of experiments and goals
- Sometimes you might not know answers to questions and that’s okay
- Try to let them try things and make mistakes
- Create an environment where they feel comfortable letting you know when a mistake has been made
- Don’t ask them to do things you wouldn’t do
