As part of the Yale University Mentoring Week initiative, co-sponsored by the GSA and the Graduate School during the week of October 29th, several departments on-campus hosted panel sessions intended to discuss mentoring here in the graduate school and to highlight best mentoring practices.

One such panel was hosted by the Chemistry, MB&B, and MCDB departments on Tuesday, October 30 from 1:30 - 2:30 in the Chemistry Research Building, Room 102.  Faculty Panelists included Professor Victor Batista (Chemistry), Professor John Carlson (MCDB), Professor Scott Strobel (MB&B) and Professor Kurt Zilm (Chemistry).

Highlights of the discussion:

• The MCDB department has a voluntary "faculty friends" program in place, through which faculty members are paired with first year graduate students for advising/mentoring prior to laboratory selection.

• While it is clear that one of the primary roles of an advisor is to guide you in your research endeavors, a mentor may be someone outside of your field who is able to guide you in more general aspects of your career/life.

• The role of Advisor includes cooperation and mentorship.

• There are different ways of being a good mentor or a good mentor and advisor - this is dependent upon personality compatibility. There are many valid choices.

• Students should think about the kind of research advisor that would like to have before making a decision about joining a laboratory. There are often problems with large personality mismatches.

• Mentoring is one of the more difficult parts of the job description of professors. It is impossible to be trained on how to handle every situation ahead of time. Advisors (should) grow into their roles as mentors as time goes on. One learns to tune his/her mentoring style to individual students. Professors interactions with student often change continuously as advisors mature in their profession.

• Sometimes advisors may start by mentoring in the way that they were mentored as graduate students, but they often eventually evolve their own mentoring styles later.

• Both the student and the advisor contribute to a mentoring relationship - it is a two-body problem.

• Student-Advisor relationships last for many years after graduation (through letter of recommendation requests, etc...), so it is a good idea to foster a healthy relationship because it may impact your career.

• With regard to students with non-academic career aspirations - this should be acceptable to your advisor; however, they may not be the most knowledgeable about you specific career path. This is a good example of a situation in which it would be ideal to have other mentors to guide you.

• Occasionally, students encounter road-blocks in their research. While part of earning your degree is to learn how to problem solve in difficult situations, it is also a good mentoring practice for advisors to help students develop secondary projects or change the direction of the problematic project.

• In general, if professors are not passable advisors, they have difficulty recruiting students. Checks and balances are at work in the sciences.

• Outside of being a research advisor to their own students, professors are often mentors to students outside of their own laboratories. This often occurs when there is a personality match. Students often meet these alternate advisors while teaching, interacting with committee members, taking part in collaborations, or taking courses.

• Advisors are constantly trying to balance the amount of structure versus the amount of independence they allow their students. Advisors also must assess which students need more of one than the other.

• When choosing a lab, students should interact with other lab members, as well as the advisor frequently (during rotations).

• Other group members change over time, while the advisor stays static. While social dynamic can play a role in a student's selection of a research group, it is important to note that the composition of the lab will change.

• It is a good idea to assess what personality traits are important to you and important for you in a mentor. Each of you can only tune to a certain extent.

• In addition to writing papers and composing a well-rounded thesis, other opportunities that mentors can provide to students include: learning to write a proposal, especially with regard to articulating ideas and building upon your skills to solve an important problem, also the emphasis in this type of writing is much different than in journal article writing; learning to effectively present research at conferences; learning to present a "chalk talk"; working on a collaborative project with another research group.

• When departments interview new faculty, in addition to all of the merit-based criteria, the search committee is also interested in the quality of candidates interactions with interviewers.

• Also in academic interviews, it is good to determine what skills are being evaluated at what times during the interview.  An advisor may be able to enlighten students with regard to this subject.

• Evidence of mentorship is something that search committees may look for in a job candidate. It is a good idea to get mentoring experience as a graduate student/post-doc by interacting with other people in the research group.

• How do students obtain letters of recommendation from people other than their advisors? Often, this is where mentors play a role. Teaching experiences, classes, collaborations, other students are all good ways of meeting other individuals who may be familiar with your strengths.