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availability of mentors during the selection process. If the emergency medicine program does not have a strong research track record, you should interview with and meet faculty outside emergency medicine during your evaluation process. If the emergency physicians cannot identify someone to mentor you, who shares your passion for your area, you will have difficulty being successful. Often, the question is asked, “What should I do, I want to become a successful researcher and work at xxxxx, but none of their faculty have any research experience?” This is really an easy question to answer — you need to decide between doing research and working at xxxxx. Either is acceptable, but you won’t become a successful researcher there. Know this from the beginning. Whether you are geographically mobile or restricted must be taken into account. You should make an informed decision and understand your likelihood of deriving satisfaction or frustration from both the job and family. Without a formal fellowship program or pathway, the actual “how” of finding a mentor for some can be as time-consuming as “cold-calling” (actually “cold-emailing”) individuals for whom there might be even a small possibility of an intersection of research interests. A real description from someone who went to an institution without an emergency medicine training track record follows: I spent the first year on faculty writing my own K proposal and trying to find a senior researcher at the institution who was already well-funded to agree to be my mentor. Over the course of the year, I emailed perhaps 50 individuals and met with those who replied: explaining my background, “shopping” around my ideas, and hoping that they would agree to be my mentor. I met with disappointment almost every time — not that they were not willing, but that they did not feel that it would be a good fit, or that they were at this time unavailable to provide me the mentorship that I needed. The reasons mainly centered around the fact that I was coming from a department that did not have the research infrastructure to support me, and that they were in departments that were pressuring them to be mentors for the junior faculty already within their department. While each of these meetings were at times disheartening, overall, it did allow me to meet with several senior investigators at least once and get an idea of how they ran their department and mentored their junior faculty. In addition, while I did not end up working with most of them, from that time I was able to point others who approached me about research to them if their interests intersected more directly, and also helped me get a better sense of the research community at large. Some were able to point me to other faculty, and this was an unintentional but important form of networking; in fact, from meeting with an individual who pointed me to another CHAPTER 3 — WHY DO I NEED A MENTOR, AND HOW DO I FIND ONE? 15 individual who pointed me to another, I was invited to a women’s research network. It was at one of these dinners (full of estrogen) where I actually teared up about not being able to find a mentor, and how I would be ultimately unsuccessful in this pursuit of research, and eventually one mid-career investigator at this dinner emailed me later to introduce me to an R01-funded researcher within the Department of Medicine at another hospital (but still within my health system) who agreed to be my primary mentor on my K award and signed off on my K proposal. Even now, though, while I did find someone to be my mentor for my K award and got funded for that award and a few others, I find myself in the predicament of not really having someone to guide me and still feel like I lack a true mentor. Since I wrote almost 100% of those proposals on my own, I feel ‘stuck’ because I don’t know how to expand my research or really engage even in conversations with my mentor about developing it further since we work in quite different fields. I have found groups like SAEM helpful in putting me in touch with other more senior researchers and maybe need to reevaluate finding a more suitable mentor for this next stage. But yes, this is what I’m learning: finding a mentor is key — not just for the very beginning, but throughout the whole process. It’s not just getting someone to sign off, it’s developing a true relationship, and that’s really hard to find. As highlighted by this individual’s experience, having a mentor is a dynamic process. As your career progresses it will become even more important to define the type of mentorship you need most. When you evaluate potential mentors, you should determine the best fit. The best fit can be determined by assessing research interests, personality, availability, and geography (in your department, institution, or not). Availability (time) should also be assessed. You will need to be able to match your needs with their time availability. You may have needs that are easily anticipatable and can be scheduled or needs that might commonly be urgent. Your mentor should be able to fulfill those needs. Can one mentor do it all? Mentorship is rarely an “all-in-one” package. You may need to have different types of mentors. Especially in the field of emergency medicine, there will unlikely be one person who can fulfill all the different needs of a mentee. Mentees should select mentors to fill their 

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