This past year has been a whirlwind: I finished my fourth year of the PhD program, got married, went on my honeymoon, moved to Long Island with my husband (wow, husband!!), and am preparing to move again to Boston where I will finish up my degree remotely. It is truly a bittersweet transition—of course I am thrilled to be married to my beloved, but at the same time, I miss my Princeton friends, community, and walking the familiar paths of campus. Anyways, amidst all these life changes, as I sat down to reflect on this year, many of my thoughts centered around my recent experiences of mentoring.
There are at least two types of mentorship: through friendship and advising. While mentoring through friendship I’ve done for many years and am quite comfortable with it, this year was the first time I mentored students through advising research projects which came with its own challenges and learning points.
As a TLDR, my main takeaways from this reflection are:
In the rest of this reflection, I’ll share my recent experiences this year with mentoring through friendship and advising respectively. Note that this is a bit of a longer reflection…
An important form of mentorship a senior graduate student can take on is being a friend to the younger students. Since high school, I’ve loved to mentor through friendship, both with naturally arising relationships and formal mentorship pairings. I enjoy walking alongside others as they transition into new stages of life, providing my perspective to their questions, and hopefully bringing peace to their worries. However, since it can be easy for new students to take what their older peers say as prescriptive, I found it also important to be transparent that what I share is just my own experience and perspective and encourage them to talk to others as well.
This year was the first year I really felt like I was stepping into the role of a senior graduate student and I learned to not put too much pressure on myself or this role. Our lab had 4 new first year PhD students (although one of them basically has the research experience of a postdoc) and it was the first time I felt like wow I’m a senior graduate student. At first, I was nervous to be a “senior student” because I still felt like a first year myself! But I recalled how comforting it was as a first year to talk to older students openly about topics like navigating classes and research, calibrating expectations for progress, taking time off, or handling feelings of imposter syndrome. Grateful for the support I had from older students, I wanted to pay it forward. Slowly, through a few coffee chats and informal conversations, I realized that I don’t need to worry about trying to impress them or give life-changing advice; I just needed to give them my time, be a listening ear and share my heart and thoughts when they asked. It’s simply about building a friendship.
This year, I also wanted to push myself outside of my comfort zone, and try mentoring through advising research projects. It was something that I had done a little bit in the past with high schoolers, but not extensively. I kept thinking I still feel like I’m learning how to do research…how can I be ready to guide someone else’s research project? In working toward overcoming these fears, I sought two advising opportunities this year with undergraduate students.
These two opportunities really taught me that while mentoring through advising may not come naturally to me now, mentoring and advising is like a muscle to grow through practice. One of the biggest things I learned is that, if possible, it’s best to disentangle what’s at stake for me from my mentee’s project. In my first advising experience, a student was helping me on my research project. However, when conference deadlines came and I felt stressed, I projected my stress onto my student. It became hard to delegate tasks that were meaningful but didn’t make me feel like “it would be quicker/less work if I just did it”.
In this situation, I first had to acknowledge to myself why I was stressed–I couldn’t blame my mentee for my stress. I had to acknowledge that I was stressed because I felt a pressure from the deadline and all the tasks that needed to get done. I wish I had the guts to be more upfront with my mentee during this time about my stresses and talk with them about redelegating tasks or pivoting their contribution, or at least share how I was feeling. Sometimes simply being transparent can help improve a working relationship.
To be honest, after my first mentorship experience, I felt like I had failed as a mentor–that maybe wasn’t not cut out for it. But through conversations with my advisor, she helped me realize that I’m just new at mentoring through advising, and it is not a skill you are born with, it is one that can be developed. This perspective helped me gain the courage to try again.
Learning from the challenges of my first experience, I structured my second advising experience such that the student worked on a project independent from mine. The topic was related, but the separation helped me think more clearly about how to support them when their deadlines came without feeling the pressure on me as well. I found that for myself, it’s better to separate their project from mine, but everyone’s different. I also know folks who prefer to work on the same thing as the students they mentor, and it’s important to find what works best for you. I’m grateful for the support of my own advisor to keep building this muscle and I see how each experience builds my experience and expertise and I’m excited to continue to try!
There are many things I learned about mentorship through advising, and reflecting more deeply on all of them would take too much space. So here are some other things I learned that I think are important to keep in mind:
P.S. opportunities for mentorship through friendship are ever-abundant! In my experiences, these have looked like formal mentorship pairings through the department, graduate school, organizations (e.g., Society of Women Engineers), or with alumni. They can also look less formal like regularly attending reading groups and getting to know people, biweekly coffee chats in our lab, or lunch time conversations that turn into friendships. And if a system is not in place currently, you can always start one!