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Relationships with your lab members are key pillar of your PhD. Especially, your relationship with your main adviser and other mentors within your lab will be fundamental for a successful PhD. Here we share an essay about how to handle such relationships.
Relationships with your lab members are key pillar of your PhD. Especially, your relationship with your main adviser and other mentors within your lab will be fundamental for a successful PhD. Here we share an essay about how to handle such relationships.
During graduated school, there are different interactions that will enrich our training experience. The range of these interactions encompasses our relationship with our peers, student we TA, undergraduate mentees, postdoctoral researchers, collaborators, and our main adviser among others. However, as enriching as these relationships can be in a personal and a professional level, they are not always rainbows and unicorns. In fact, sometimes they can be very challenging.
Arguably, one of the most important relationship that we will have in graduate school will be the one we have with our main adviser, a.k.a. principal investigator (PI). Indeed, this relationship is so pivotal to our graduate school experience that talking about PIs is a common bonding topic during hang outs. I bet that during these times you will hear a few terror stories about terrible PIs that make the lives of their graduate students and postdocs a living hell. You may also hear one or two fairy tails where students worship their PhD mentors with devotion. However, most relationships between graduate students and their main adviser will lie somewhere in the middle: we will admire deeply certain aspects of them, and some others aspects may cause us a lot of stress and confusion.
I claim that in most cases, the frustration that we may feel towards our PI's mentoring style will be absolutely justified. And here is why: Academia hires remarkable scientists, not outstanding managers or coaches. Most advisers may not have all the skills needed for becoming admirable mentors. Maybe they will naturally excel at one or two of those skills, but there's no guarantee that they have had any mentoring training, so they may lack other essential skills. This means, for better or for worse, that advisers' only mentoring training is the school of life.
Mentoring styles drawn from personal experience can take different flavors. Some PIs advise as they have been advised in the past, regardless if this is their preferred way to advise or being advised. These PIs are basically stuck in a certain way in which Academia must work, and repeat the tape over and over again. There are other PIs that advise as they would like to be advised. These could be the most common case and I don't blame them, it's in our human nature to assume others preferences must be the same as ours. In some remarkable cases, if a PI has really disliked her previous mentorships experiences, she will do the total opposite. For example, if a PI hated to be terribly micromanaged during her postdoctoral training, she will be extremely hands-off with their trainees. Conversely, if she felt an absolute lack of mentoring and guidance, she may overcompensate by micromanaging her trainees.
The "mentoring-up" approach to grad school
The "mentoring-up" approach to grad school
Regardless of the adviser's reasons to mentor in one or another way, PIs rarely adapt to meet their trainees' needs. And as you may imagine, in such case the most affected are, indeed, the very same trainees. However, mentoring is a process that involves two people: the mentor and the mentee. We might not be able to change (at least not today) how Academia works and the lacking of mentoring training. However, we have agency to exert changes in the other side of the coin, the one that concern us, the mentee side.
When we are overwhelmed by the multiple aspects that grad school implies while balancing our personal life needs and demands, taking care (at least partly) of our mentor-mentee relationship may sound like a really unfair business. After all, we came here to learn, we are the trainees. And I get it, I feel the same way every-time I read yet another advice about "mentoring-up". But, there is some truth to it. If anything, take it as practice for your professional career after the PhD, because actively designing the kind of work relationships that we want is – in general – good life advice.
More formally, mentoring-up – and idea adapted from a business concept called "managing-up" – is the idea that mentees must be active participants in their mentoring relationships achieving equal emphasis in the mentor's responsibilities as well as the mentee's responsibilities in a mentoring relationship [1]. Other authors have referred to this concept as "the care and maintenance of your adviser" [2]. I prefer to call it "the care and maintenance of ourselves", because a good relationship with our PI and other mentors (here I'm thinking on postdocs, senior scientists or members of your dissertation committee) will make us more productive, less stressed, more fulfilled, and overall happier graduate students.
How to make the best out of mentor-mentee relationships
How to make the best out of mentor-mentee relationships
A very important question that remains to be answered is how can we be active participants in our mentor-mentee relationship in this very hierarchical world of Academia. It certainly doesn't include to be confrontational, passive-aggressive, or demanding. As many relationships in our life, it is more in line with this very old and relevant idea: effective communication. To put this concept into practice, in the following paragraphs, I will go over some down-to-earth practices that you can start implementing towards a "mentoring-up" approach to grad school.
The design of the mentor meeting
The design of the mentor meeting
Having meetings with our PIs is key to make progress in our research project. Science involves a lot of trials and errors, coming up with hypotheses to explain expected and unexpected results, and connect seemingly disconnected concepts. Experienced scientists – like our PIs – will excel at all these points. Therefore, it makes sense to get this sort of knowledge from them.
In the modern scientific world, there are multiple channels of communication to achieve this; we can send a series of e-mails back and forth, chat in Slack or use the old-school mentor meeting. The efficiency and efficacy of each one of these methods can be a point of controversy. There are fervent Slack devotees and equally fervent detractors. There are e-mail lovers (are there?) and e-mail haters. Personally, I think there is a time and place for each one of this tools, and they do not replace each other (at least not yet). Regardless the tool, to make the best out of our communication with our mentors there is one fundamental advice to abide to: we have to be intentional with what kind of guidance we want. In particular, considering that mentor meetings are still the main form of intellectual exchange between trainees and PIs, this means primarily that we have to design our meetings.
Designing a meeting involves two steps: first, we have to schedule it and, secondly, we need to define the main outputs we want to get from the meeting. The first point is fairly obvious; if we don't schedule the meeting it's unlikely to ever happen. Certainly, you can bump into your PI in the hallway and briefly discuss some results, but we cannot rely on that that kind of serendipity if we want to achieve any progress in our dissertation at a reasonable pace. The second point is somewhat forgotten, but just showing up to a meeting with our mentor is not by itself particularly productive. If you meet to discuss the weather, it is unlikely that this will be insightful or helpful for your career goals.
How often should we schedule mentor meetings? Depending on the PI, mentor meeting culture can be extremely different. "Relaxed" PIs will tell trainees "ask for a meeting when you have something you want to discuss". More structured ones will have a policy of meeting with all trainees every other week or maybe every week. Some PIs may expect a formal slides with significant progress, other may want to chat informally about some result. Some PIs use that time to go over administrative stuff, and others exclusively for science. With such loose structure, how can we even decide how often to meet? My best answer to this is that we should aim to meet as often as we think it will be beneficial for us and the progress of our research. This basically implies that if we are meeting less than that magical number, we need to discuss it with our PI. Of course, we cannot go and relentlessly demand other person's time, but we can certainly negotiate and reach a point where both mentor and mentee are content.
So going into the next point, how can we design a mentor meeting that will be effective in providing the guidance that we need? The answer is within the question: we need to start by defining what is the guidance that we need. This could be as general as the kind of accountability that we want and as specific as the number of replicates in a certain analysis. After strategically thinking about all the topics in which we will benefit from our PI's insight, we need to make sure that they will solved in the meeting. Therefore, we need to recollect all the pieces of information that we think may be important to answer such question. Of course, a lot of things will not be immediately sealed in the meeting, and during the conversation additional ideas will come up. But that's exactly the point of the meeting: now you have an action plan for the next weeks.
Requesting specific feedback
Requesting specific feedback
Undoubtedly, receiving feedback graciously is a fundamental skill to achieve personal growth. No matter how insightful and perceptive we are, there will be blind spots in our work and skillset that we will not be aware of unless someone points them to us. A mentor should be a masterful feedback giver, that's one of her main roles. However, more often than not, that is not the case. PIs may give feedback in such a way that makes us cry or resist to give any feedback at all. Sometimes they can give feedback that is too general to be helpful or too specific to the point we feel extremely micro-managed.
Giving the right feedback is an uncommon and extremely valuable skill and chances are that our PIs will not have this one in her skillset. However, there are ways in which we can foster a better communication in this regard. In particular, we need to ask for feedback and we need to do it specifically. This implies that we should to be proactive requesting feedback in areas on which we want our mentor's guidance, and when we do so, we need to express explicitly in which aspects we want such guidance. This is especially relevant in manuscripts writing. It will be extremely risky to write a whole manuscript just to show the "finished" piece to our PIs who thinks we went in the totally wrong direction. The best approach in this regard is to get feedback earlier at different stages of the process. For example, start with an outline. Get feedback. Improve the outline. Get feedback again. Define sections. Get feedback. enumerate take home messages per paragraph in bullet points. Get feedback. Make draft of figures. Get feedback. And so on so forth.
Besides asking for feedback related to our immediate work, we shouldn't forget to ask for long-term feedback. This is, asking our mentors what skill we should learn or work on to be successful in our future career path. They will usually reply to that questions with the answer they would have liked to received in early stages of their career. For example, a PI can advise us to strengthen a specific scientific skill or maybe increase our outreach activities.
Aligning expectations at all levels
Aligning expectations at all levels
It wouldn't be an understatement to say that most problems between PIs and trainees arise from misunderstandings about expectations. These misunderstandings can be related to things that are as practical as timelines and as general as what do we expect from our mentor-mentee relationship. Having a conversation about expectations can be tricky and certainly uncomfortable for many. However, if they are not made clear then we can stumble upon one of the most difficult challenges between PIs and trainees: disappointment.
The first step towards aligning expectations is to make them explicit. We shouldn't play mind-readers with our PIs. But what kind of expectations should we made explicit? First, we need to agree on timelines for our next goal and, secondly, state what kind of help we want from our PI in the process. After we state our expectation, our counterpart will most likely state hers. If she doesn't, we may want to ask directly "what do you think?". Here comes the second step, the "aligning" part. This can be achieved by having a conversation and assess a shared understanding of what each other expects.
Importantly, expectations may change over time. For example, the expectations that a PI has for a first-year trainee will be different than for a fourth-year one. In our end, this implies that expectations should be aligned through clear communication on a regular basis.
The other side of the coin: how to become an effective mentor?
The other side of the coin: how to become an effective mentor?
Academia is based on a mentoring continuum. At every stage of our academic journey we are both mentees and mentors. Specifically, as graduate students, we will be most likely the mentee of our PI (or a postdoc), and mentors of undergraduate researchers and students that we TA. As undergraduate mentors, we also hold the responsibility to be active participants in the shaping of the mentor-mentee relationship. However, Academia usually does not provide instances for mentoring training, which may lead us to "mentor as we've been mentored", even if that is not the best or most strategic way to do so. Seeking for advice on how to become better mentors can be a good place to start ameliorating the mentoring continuum.
Good undergraduate mentoring has multiple advantages for the mentee, us and science overall. When an undergraduate receives good mentoring, she is more likely to continue in Academia. Good mentoring acts like magnet for attracting hard-working, smart individuals into scientific research. Also, it is a great opportunity for us to develop mentoring, leadership and organizational skills that will become handy when we lead our own teams or laboratories. Moreover, trained undergraduate researchers can increasingly contribute to the project, accelerating science. However you look at it, it's a win-win.
To become better mentors we first need to change our mindset: undergraduate researchers are junior colleagues not laborers. As such, we must schedule meetings to discuss and clarify the scientific question, methodologies and experimental design underlying the project that our mentee is working on. The focus must be to gradually incorporate our trainee into the scientific project as whole. In addition, the discussion of the project must be complemented with encouraging a broader understanding of the field. The best way to do this is by introducing our mentees into the world of scientific literature. The best articles for this purpose are "(1) research articles closely related to the ongoing project, which provide the back- ground and describe commonly used approaches; (2) balanced and comprehensive reviews with a broad scope covering the relevant field; and (3) classic landmark papers with brilliant experimental designs and far-reaching impact." [3].
Besides technical and research skills, we don't want to forget promoting scientific communication skills in our trainee. As such, undergraduate researchers should be allowed to present in lab meetings following a similar format to graduate students and postdoc. Also, we must encourage their participation in undergraduate conferences and other presentations.
However, above everything, we want o be mindful of our trainee's schedule and overall well-being. There is no need to continue the cycle of "toughen-up" so engrained in the Academic engine. Good managers care about their team. We should also care of our trainees.
An act of self-care
An act of self-care
Healthy and effective academic relationship are key for our overall well-being. Good relationships can accelerate our research and enrich our lives. Here we have covered the main academic relationships that we will encounter as mentees and mentors. However, we shouldn't forget about other types of relationships: the ones that we have with our lab mates and fellow graduates students. The complicity that the shared experience provides can generate bonds that may last a lifetime. We shouldn't forget about nurturing and treasuring such bonds because it is ultimately an act of self-care.
References
References
[1] Kearns, Hugh, and Maria Gardiner. 2011. “The Care and Maintenance of Your Adviser.” Nature 469 (7331): 570–570. Link.
[2] Wright, Glenn. 2015. "Mentoring Up: Learning to manage your mentoring relationships" in The Mentoring Continuum: From Graduate School through Tenure. Syracuse University Press.
[3] Li, Jiefu, and Liqun Luo. 2020. “Nurturing Undergraduate Researchers in Biomedical Sciences.” Cell 182 (1): 1–4. Link.
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