Finding a Mentor
Bethany Brookshire (00:11):
Identifying your passion. For some people it's easy. A young girl looks up at the night sky fascinated by far away stars and from that moment forward, is driven to become an astronomer. A boy born with an incurable disease, dedicates his life to becoming a physician who treats kids just like him. Whether you're someone who's known your passion all your life, or like most of us, had to work hard to find it, we all want to discover the passion that pushes us forward through life and we all need help.
This is The Science of Mentorship, a podcast from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. It explores the mentoring skills that can and should be learned to unleash everyone's potential in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine, or STEM careers. I'm your host, Bethany Brookshire.
In season one of The Science of Mentorship, distinguished scientists, physicians, mathematicians, and engineers shared their personal experiences with mentorship and how those experiences have shaped their careers. For season two, we wanted to provide a different perspective, so I sat down with students, undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate to hear about their experiences with mentorship. Through these stories, we're going to learn the importance of mutually beneficial, considerate, and collaborative mentoring relationships and help you understand how to participate in and encourage those relationships yourself.
In my conversations with students, it quickly became apparent just how important mentorship relationships can be. Sometimes for example, a mentor can help you find your way. Brianna Benedict is a PhD candidate at Purdue University who had a different path in mind when she earned her undergraduate degree
Brianna Benedict (01:57):
Throughout my undergraduate experience, I had interned at General Electric for three summers, starting the summer after my first year. So, in my mind, I was going to apply to the operations management leadership program. It's a rotational program that GE offers. It just so happened that I did not get the rotational program position and so one of my mentors at General Electric, when she found out that I didn't get the position, she went to the program officer for that rotational program and said, "Hey, why didn't Brianna get it, she's a excellent candidate." And the person said that I am an excellent candidate, but I didn't have the energy for energy.
Bethany Brookshire (02:42):
When a door closes like that, it can be difficult to know how to move forward. Brianna wasn't accepted into a program she thought was the right path because a program officer noticed that she didn't have the passion for the job. It was Brianna's mentor who helped her find a way forward by encouraging her to think about her passion, her energy, and why it didn't seem to fit with the program she expected.
Brianna Benedict (03:03):
I had to really reflect on, "Well, what do I have the energy for?" When I thought back to where I spent my spare time, because I'm very passionate about community service and engagement, and so I would find a program to be involved with children, Closing the Gaps was a program that I was a part of, and we help students with various life skills and just, just mentoring in general. I also participated in a program where I helped this elementary student with his reading skills and his scores actually improved and that was super exciting to me. So, when I reflected on some of those experiences that I had, I decided that it's education that I'm really passionate about, but within the context of engineering.
Bethany Brookshire (03:53):
This was an important realization in Brianna's STEM journey and it gave her mentor the opportunity to help her find a new path, the right path.
Brianna Benedict (04:02):
Even though I draw on tools in industrial engineering in what I do now, that is not specifically what I was passionate about. I was really passionate about engineering education and helping other students become engineers. So, I pretty much just told her my story and so she said, "Oh, that sounds like engineering education." And she started connecting me with people and I continued to get my master's in industrial engineering, but my thesis topic was engineering and their writing skills, because I felt like engineers didn't write enough, which is an important skill, but it's not something that we necessarily reinforce throughout a lot of our projects and activities.
Bethany Brookshire (04:46):
Brianna's mentor helped her find the right path by encouraging her to reflect on her passion and energy and it changed the course of her career. Helping mentees make the right career decisions is just one of the many mentor roles we'll be discussing in this season and Brianna was fortunate to have the mentors she needed at that moment, but that takes us back to the beginning of the process.
How do you find a mentor, or more importantly, how do you find the right mentor for you? The students I spoke with had lots of different experiences finding mentors.
Brianna Benedict (05:26):
I met her at a conference and I saw her presenting her work. I just walked up to her afterwards and said, "Hey, do you mind chatting with me at some point throughout this conference?" And she said yes.
Speaker 3 (05:37):
We were assigned mentors based off of the area of research you wanted to go into, which was kind of discussed beforehand.
Speaker 4 (05:44):
I'll see someone on LinkedIn and I'm like, "I really need to ask them a question," because you get to hear someone's story or you look through their background and you're like, "I might want to take that path."
Bethany Brookshire (05:55):
Despite their many different experiences, the students I spoke with understood that mentorship should complement teaching to support them, not just in developing knowledge and skills, but also to develop a strong identity as a STEM professional, to build confidence in their abilities, and to help them navigate the culture of STEM. When Dr. Michael Green decided to pursue a PhD, he was deliberate about the mentorship experience he wanted.
Dr. Michael Green (06:18):
When it came time to find mentors, I took a bigger, more serious approach into researching who I could work with and see if we meshed well. The type of mentor I was looking for was based on my own personal research style. I feel like for me, I need a little more freedom to be creative in my research, but also flexibility with my time because I mentioned I have a family. So, one thing I want to look forward to is someone may have a family, who also understands the value. Family comes first, that's the one thing I've always grown up with, that your family, no matter what life happens, you got to take care of your family first.
Bethany Brookshire (07:01):
At Georgia Tech, Michael met Dr. Gilda Barabino, one of the mentors we featured in the first episode of season one of this podcast.
Dr. Michael Green (07:09):
Dr. Barabino and I met actually off campus at a restaurant. Unfortunately food, is the way to my heart, so she already had a leg up on the competition, but we discussed our interests and her interests in sickle cell disease. It so happens that at my undergrad institution, Morehouse College, sickle cell disease is part of our training in biology. I already had an awareness of sickle cell disease, but also the fact that it disproportionately affects African Americans. So, her mission and also the mission of Morehouse, is also to uplift or help the African-American community and it rung with me that this is something I can do to get my degree, but also give back to my community in a way. So, I think after lunch with her and us just connecting on a personal level, made it a done deal. I tell her all the time, "When I grow up, I'm want to be just like you."
Bethany Brookshire (08:20):
Dr. Green saw something in Dr. Barabino that he knew was important to him, an inclusive, welcoming person, who is intentional about individuals' lived experiences. And he's carried that experience with him in his post-doc work at the University of Texas at Austin.
Dr. Michael Green (08:35):
Person I work with, she is a champion for under-represented minorities and women. So at our lab, there's a big poster in this lab, "Black Lives Matter, immigrants are welcome," it's a description of all of these groups of people who have been discouraged, not just in science, but just in US history altogether, that they matter and here is where you can thrive and survive.
Bethany Brookshire (09:11):
That personal connection, one that respects who you are and how you want to live was a common theme in my conversations, young people entering or considering careers in STEM want mentors who understand that they come into academia and industry from different backgrounds and walks of life.
Speaker 3 (09:27):
Identifying a great mentor is about having someone that can easily identify where it is that you're at and where it is that you need to be.
Brianna Benedict (09:36):
I think it's important to make sure you find someone who is human. Some people care a lot about prestige, but for me, it's about finding someone who's human, because you're going to experience a lot throughout a graduate program and your life does not stop.
Speaker 6 (09:53):
I love when people are passionate when they're teaching. I just want to know why they're so passionate, especially if they're excited about it. I love listening to people who are just excited about their own topics. I feel like that's really exciting and that makes me want to listen to them.
Bethany Brookshire (10:07):
These experiences of finding the right mentor, someone who can help guide a career in STEM are inspiring, but they only present part of the picture. Mentorship isn't just about one mentor and one mentee.
As we learned in season one of the Science of Mentorship, the goal of good mentorship isn't to create cookie cutter reproductions of a mentor. It takes more than just a single relationship to influence academic and career development. In fact, mentoring relationships with multiple individuals within and outside of one's home department, program, or institution, are truly significant to effective mentoring relationships. Many of the people I spoke with stress how important it has been for them to have multiple mentors. Isaiah Sypher is a graduate student in clinical psychology at the University of Michigan.
Isaiah Sypher (10:59):
So, here at the University of Michigan, it's quite normal for students to have multiple mentors or a primary advisor and a secondary advisor, it's quite common. And it was something that I think even my advisor, I think it was something that he himself had identified because he knew what my interests were my interest in qualitative research, for example, and maybe also saw that I was also someone who is interested in a mentor who maybe did more identity-based work or wanting to work in a more diverse lab environment.
So, it wasn't something that I had to come to him and say, "Hey, listen, I've been thinking about this." It was really, he encouraged it. He really, really, fully encouraged it.
Bethany Brookshire (11:59):
[Carrie Shafer 00:11:59] is a science policy fellow with the Gulf Research Program of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. She came into her multiple mentorship experience in an unexpected way, but quickly learned that having more than one mentor offers plenty of advantages.
Carrie Shafer (12:13):
Over the past year, I've had a unique experience and that I've had three mentors who I've been able to meet with biweekly. I actually split my time between a program that works specifically on sea level rise and then the US Fish and Wildlife Service. So, I was going into this program, knowing that I would have two mentors because of that setup. And then right before I started, one of my mentors actually got a new job. So, he ended up leaving and then I got a new Fish and Wildlife mentor, but then my original mentor from Fish and Wildlife was like, "I would really like to stay on, I feel bad that I'm leaving right before you're starting this year as a science policy fellow." So, that's how I ended up with these three mentors.
Bethany Brookshire (13:03):
Carrie understands the different value each of these relationships has and is learning from the diverse roles. Each of her mentors plays in her career and stem development.
Carrie Shafer (13:12):
So I definitely would say my relationship with each one of them is a little bit different. I do the majority of my work with my main supervisor, who is the program coordinator. So, I spend a lot of time with her. I am working in the office that she's in. So, we have both that supervisor/supervisee relationship, but also a mentor/mentee relationship.
Then my mentor out of Fish and Wildlife, he is also a supervisor to some degree, but we don't work together quite as much. So, he's there in much more of a mentor-type role. He's a bit older, so he is more experienced. He's been able to tell me a lot about how to manage teams and everything like that and the breadth of experience he has in the field.
Then my third mentor is solely within that mentor camp, I guess you could say. So he will come to our bi-weekly meetings and he's a social scientist, so it's really great to be able to pick his brain about the social science aspects of work. He's really interested in the way people do their own work and aspects of leadership and things like that. But it's been a really great experience being able to work with the three of them.
Bethany Brookshire (14:26):
Dr. Green from UT Austin is taking what he's learned from the mentors he's had through his career so far and setting himself up for a future of great mentoring experiences.
Dr. Michael Green (14:37):
I'm starting to figure out what roles I need people to fulfill and there'll be either the career aspect, mentor, or someone who's just a mental support. There's also the person who just going to uplift me like, "Oh, you're great." But in terms of my professional career, I'm trying to find these people who can fit these different roles, because I've learned from other people who have learned about their mentoring team, essentially, they've been building over time.
So, I think I'm in that right place to where I start picking people and figuring out, "I need you for this. Can you help me?" So, that's something that I'm working on.
Bethany Brookshire (15:25):
Mentorship is an alliance of people working together to support the personal and professional growth, development and success of the partners. In this episode of The Science of Mentorship, we've heard from stem professionals, who've had mentors guide their career paths in positive, meaningful ways that connect their passion to their work. We've learned that there are many ways to find a mentor and have come to recognize that mentorship should complement teaching, to help mentees develop their identity as a professional in stem, to build their confidence and to help them engage successfully in the culture of stem.
We've seen that you don't have to have just one mentor or even mentors who are specific to your program or discipline. Having more than one mentor offers multiple ways to develop professionally, personally and socially.
In the next episode of The Science of Mentorship, we'll hear from more undergraduates, graduates, doctoral candidates and postdocs about setting expectations for their mentoring relationship and when necessary, setting boundaries. You can learn more about the science of effective mentoring in STEM at mas.edu/mentoring. If you're enjoying The Science of Mentorship, please tell your friends, colleagues, students, teachers, and of course your mentors and mentees about our podcast and help others discover it by giving us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Thanks for listening.
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