Scientific mentoring

Jing Xu brought to my attention some stuff on scientific mentoring in the current issue of Nature. They have a bunch of articles on this stuff in the current issue. You can read one of them here.

Here is an article that I wrote on mentoring versus being mentored, and here is a slightly longer version.

What Jing e-mailed me was the following excerpt (from an article other than the one above... maybe from a podcast?):


Kerri Smith: Science, like any other enterprise, needs young blood to keep it going, but how does the scientific community go about shaping and guiding its newest charges to become the great scientists of the future. That is the subject of a feature in this week's Nature. Philip Campbell, Nature's editor-in-chief was one of the authors of that piece. Phil, first of all tell us what you mean by mentoring?

Philip Campbell: What I mean by mentoring is something more than being a principal investigator or the head of a research group or a PhD supervisor. A mentor is someone who is that much more involved in the welfare of the people for whom they are responsible. And what we have put into this article is the outcome, its evidence based if you like, as a result of a competition we held in Australia last year to find outstanding mentors in the region and we got people to nominate their mentors and by looking at everything they said about their mentors we distilled out some of the properties, as it were, of these people that seemed to be so rewarding for the people who work for them.

Kerri Smith: Give us your top tips then on how to be a good mentor?

Philip Campbell: One of the clear winning tips, as it were, which we saw in all the nominees in fact was to be accessible and that is at two different levels, one is physically, that is, be there and to have an open door. It was quite clear that although these were all very successful scientists with lots of demands on their time they made absolutely sure that young scientists under their care could come and see them. It did not mean that they were mothering them as it were it did not mean that they were making it easy for them. These people also had the ability to balance being supportive, particularly the early stages with getting quite tough and critically minded as things moved on. So, that was one way in which they were there. The other way in which they were there was being if you like diverse in their responsiveness, because every student or every post
doc is different in character and these people seem to have a special ability to empathize with different people in different ways and adjust to get the best results out of the character that they had to work with.

Kerri Smith: So, accessibility one big theme and a tailoring of mentoring responsibilities to each individual scientists, communication was also a big theme, I gather?

Philip Campbell: Yeah, communication in two different ways, one was a level of knowledge and breadth of interest that the mentor themselves had was outstanding generally so that you knew you could as a young scientists go in and talk to them and get the experience of that breadth of knowledge given back to you, but then there was also mentoring about communication as a key theme. So, helping young scientists write papers is something that anybody does, but the degree of care that these people took and the degree of challenge that they imposed on the young people in terms of really being critical about the way they use language that was obviously very important. And actually there is one other thing that I wanted to highlight after this exercise and that is the responsibility to help young people become better peer reviewers. One accentual piece of communication between scientists is criticisms of each other's work in the peer review process and the best mentors remember that and help people write good objective and balanced referees report.

Kerri Smith: So, there is obviously lot for young scientists to gain from being mentored by a very successful scientists in their own rights. In this case, what is in it for the mentors themselves? When you spoke to them, what had they gained from it?

Philip Campbell: That is actually a very pointed question because the answer is not much in terms of external recognition. I think, what was interesting about all this was to realize that this activity is going on all the time and some people are really good at it. There are other people who produce extremely good prot?g?s by leaving them to sink and swim. If you swim, you are great and you come out of that really well and there are plenty of really prestigious labs like this, but if you sink of course you are lost, whereas the mentors that we looked for had satisfaction without the recognition, that the satisfaction of helping people who would otherwise sink, survive and indeed go on to get really good careers.