Advancing to new tasks

If your mentee is not independent and relies on you constantly, maybe they are not ready to move on to new, harder tasks. One way to assist them can be to provide more detail of your own thought process, and then to prompt mentees to explain back to you what they understand to be sure they are progressing.

Create a checklist of the different steps of a process or a project, and walk them through it. Ask them questions about each step, this will help you gauge how much training your mentee will require in order to move on to the next steps.

After you walk them through the checklist and they answer everything correctly, they might be ready to do the experiment by themselves, but not entirely confident. Make sure they know they can still rely on you.

Tell your mentee they will probably need to be trained on these new tasks and impress upon them the responsibility that comes with doing more advanced experiments in the lab.