Mentorship in the PhD

There has been uproar on academic Twitter recently about a paper that concludes that males are better academic mentors than females for female protoges. This paper sparked an immediate backlash, and spawned multiple petitions for the journal to retract the paper due to faulty methods of deduction. This petition, for example, states “the data shown in the manuscript do not accurately reflect “mentorship” but just authorship networks. Coauthorship, the metric used to measure mentorship success, clearly and simply does not fulfill the complexity of a mentor-mentee relationship, which outcomes could exceed (and not be reflected) in a list of authors in a paper.”  Apparently this research is more likely to produce frustration than enlighten, so it is not on my reading list. However it did get me thinking about mentorship.

Mentorship is a big part of the graduate school experience. Of course I benefit from mentorship from professors and the many people who help me navigate graduate school and grow as a scientist. I was surprised to find that I also play an important role as mentor to other graduate students and undergraduates. Graduate students have an important role in the mentoring ecosystem.

The most formal expression of mentorship in my program and many others is the committee. The PhD committee comprises four people including my primary advisor. The role of the committee is to guide, advise, assess, and connect. They read my proposals and give me feedback on my ideas. They are the gatekeepers of the degree, those who finally approve or disapprove the dissertation work. I appreciate my committee a lot. Finding mentors is a skill of its own and one I’ve never been very good at, I feel lucky to have been able to assemble this group.

Assembling a committee is actually one of the first things were supposed to do in my program, and I did not know how to go about it. As I had never gotten my PhD before, I didn’t know who to approach who would be helpful to me or who I would feel comfortable working with. It also feels like a big ask, and I wasn’t sure who would want to take me on. I made many lists. I ended up asking two professors whose courses I had taken. I asked a fourth member based on her specialty, reputation, and enjoying a talk she gave. They all said yes, so I guess it wasn’t as scary as it seemed.

One thing I tried to do was put a man on my committee. In the same way that all-man panels or committees feel off, an all-woman committee felt off to me. I did have a man on my committee in the beginning, but as my project changed, his specialty was less relevant. By the second phase of the PhD, we are required to have a committee member from outside of Rutgers. This was another somewhat paralyzing process involving much list-making and hesitation. Some of the people I emailed never responded, and some didn’t want to engage. Then once again I struck gold with someone who was extremely responsive, knowledgeable, and kind who was willing to jump in to talk about plants and ecology with me.

There is a lot of informal mentorship in my program among graduate students. One of us gives a short talk every Friday at an informal seminar. There is also a data club, a journal club, and one-off events for different subjects. The exposure to ideas from my peers is some of the most valuable mentoring I can get. Often, they are the most up-to-date on methods, and always willing to help. They also just get me because they are in relatively the same stage as I am. I found a buddy in the program early on because we were both in the plant classes and also in the same TA program. She was a year ahead of me though, so had lots of insight to share. Amy has been an invaluable friend and mentor throughout this process, and wish everyone the same luck in finding a slightly more advanced friend who can drop a breadcrumb trail for you everywhere they go.

I’m not as active as I should be as a mentor for other graduate students, but I do a lot with undergraduates. For one thing, I’m a teaching assistant every semester. When I was teaching in the biology program, I worked hard to motivate and inspire students through difficult introductory courses. Since I have been teaching as a lab instructor in the Ecology program I have gotten to do a lot of curriculum writing. I try to think about the gaps in our program for undergraduates and the things I have struggled with. I don’t feel that far removed from what  undergraduate goes through in some ways. I came into the graduate program with a lot of life experience but not a lot of science experience, so I have taken a number of fundamental courses, and also seen their experience through teaching. I think seeing their struggles and knowing my own motivates me to want to help my students build their skills and understanding.

Lastly, I supervise undergraduate research assistants who help me with my work. This is the third year that I’ve had “my own” students, and before that I helped oversee my advisor’s assistants. I’ve experienced a shift in how I think of these students. At first, I was only interested in their labor. I thought of it only as opportunity to have undergraduates do some of the work I needed done. That often didn’t work out as I hoped—in many cases I didn’t provide the training and mentoring necessary for them to be the most productive for me.

I’ve moved away from a “take” mentality now. While the students do accomplish important tasks for me, I want them to gain as much in the experience as I do. My goal is for us to accomplish more than I would alone, but not as twice as much. . I provide a lot more structured expectations and training up front now. I was very inspired by this professor’s guide for her students and came up with one of my own. Sometimes it takes a student long time to get up to speed. Now I take that in stride and try to provide time and space for students to learn new skills before I expect them to be able to use them at a high-level.