Mentoring today and into the future
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BEYOND THE LAB
Mentoring today and into the future Wendy C. Crone
W
e are all engaged in mentoring relationships, personally and professionally, and each varies from the others in the duration, depth, and topic. These mentoring relationships are often vital to the learning and decision making of the mentee. In my own case, I can recall the influence of past mentors on my career trajectory, the graduate programs I considered, the balance I sought with personal and professional responsibilities, the productivity and visibility of my research, and the techniques I brought to the classroom in teaching, to name a few. Mentoring often comes from a wide array of sources; those you would expect (like my graduate advisors or the mentor committee I was assigned as a junior faculty member) and those that might be less obvious (like my fellow junior colleagues
or my next door neighbor). Although I strongly advocate that people develop a constellation of mentors for a range of personal and professional needs, I have structured this article around the canonical senior/junior mentor/mentee dyad, which is the most pervasive type in scientific culture. I will focus on how these key mentoring relationships should change over the course of time. The most familiar of these dyad mentor/mentee relationships is likely to be the professor/graduate student relationship. This relationship may be more complex than others because it is often one that is convolved with a supervisory role if there is a research assistantship funded by the faculty member. However, I will use this as an initial example because this mentor/mentee relationship usually lasts for multiple years and may extend beyond the student’s Senoir degree completion. colleague From experience, mentor we know that these relationships run the gamut, from healthy Peers, ones where inforProfessional colleagues, mation and advice society and peer is freely exchanged mentors groups and the students deMentee velop the breadth of research expertise they need for their Formal future career, to the mentoring unhealthy ones where Community programs and issues such as absenmembers workshops teeism, domineering behavior, and inability to take constructive criticism sigMentoring should be sought from a range of sources. Each relationship may provide different perspectives or mentoring nificantly hinder the advice on different topics. possibility of positive outcomes. However,
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MRS BULLETIN
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VOLUME 36 • MAY 2011
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www.mrs.org/bulletin
even in the healthiest of these relationships, there must be change over time. Because one of the main goals of such a mentor/mentee relationship is to help the mentee develop professionally, the scope and flavor of the interactions and advice must change as the mentee begins to establish himself. In other words, as the mentee matures professionally the mentoring exchange must also mature. When things are working well, the graduate student grows into a junior colleague over time. In the ideal, the individual eventually becomes a fully fledged colle
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