Mentoring

Valuing the Individual

I value my mentees as individuals by respecting and critically engaging differences while leveraging unique perspectives as assets to learning.

Beliefs, attitudes, identities, and prior experiences are crucial factors to an individual's identity and to the learning process. I critically engage these differences to promote an inclusive and productive research environment. I utilize a mentor-mentee compact as a tool to facilitate introductions and to learn about individuals' past academic experiences, goals, concerns, and other information to help me plan learning opportunities.

In Fall 2020, a PharmD student joined my advisor's research lab for a month-long advanced pharmacy practice experience. I requested to be this individual's primary mentor as an opportunity to develop my mentoring skills before graduating and leading a lab of my own. During our first meeting, my mentee and I used a compact to share our expectations and collaboratively develop mutual goals for the short one-month rotation. I deliberately chose materials and activities with the mentee's circumstances in mind and acknowledged and valued their time and capacity to engage in research.

During the short one-month experience, I asked the PharmD student to join our weekly research lab meetings. I recognized that my clinically trained mentee had a background that was very different from the research-trained lab members. I normalized these differences during the meeting by asking my mentee provide their novel perspective to the lab members' content or research questions. They helped to identify gaps in the lab's understanding and provided a unique clinical lens to examine problems.

Encouraging Mentees to be the Best Versions of Themselves

I encourage mentees to be the best versions of themselves by promoting self-directed lifelong learning.

The research process develops skills that promote self-directed lifelong learning and has applications to many facets of life (beyond academia, research, or even professional expertise). Mistakes are productive and allow individuals to learn from failures--the value is in trying. I promote the metacognitive and reflective processes to cultivate self-directed individuals. I ask mentees to reflect on their work compared to others in the field, monitor their progress and and evaluate their own strengths and weaknesses.

Creating an Environment where Mentees are Excited and Motivated to Apply What They are Learning

I foster excitement and motivation in my mentees by modeling enthusiasm and supporting natural inquiry and sense of autonomy.

I generate an atmosphere that is open, positive, and conducive to stimulate natural curiosity where mentees are eager to learn. I enhance mentee's perceived relevance of research through my generally positive nature and excitement and modeling enthusiasm for the topic. I support motivation by providing mentees autonomy to choose research topics and questions that fit their interests and fuels their own excitement.