We asked Elizabeth Joyce’s opinion on teaching as an academic at the Naturejobs career expo, San Francisco.
https://youtu.be/PwXGjUBtSrY
Teaching as an academic
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Tag Archives: mentoring
How did you cultivate mentors?
We ask members of our careers in academia panel, at the Naturejobs career expo, San Francisco, how they cultivated mentors.
https://youtu.be/1ZnyQ5aKR0o
Study system envy
Graduate students must often weigh the pros and cons of straying from an advisor’s research program
Guest contributor Carolyn Beans
Early in graduate school, I had total study system envy. In many biological fields, including my own field of evolutionary ecology, a study system is a specific species that a scientist uses to run tests. Some of these species like mice, zebrafish, and the plant Arabidopsis are model organisms, and have been well-studied for decades or more. Whether scientists choose a model organism or a relatively unknown species as a study system can have drastic consequences for their research.
Zebrafish{credit}Uri Manor, NICHD{/credit}
Team science and the early career researcher
The current trend towards increased research collaboration and larger groups is fuelled by the need to answer bigger questions, but this approach puts individual contributions at risk.
Guest contributor Lucia Possamai
Research ventures where several researchers, groups or institutions work together to answer a research question is becoming known as ‘team science.’ It can be seen at work today in large genetics studies, such as the 100,000 genomes project, in multi-centre clinical trials, or in rare disease consortia. Even on a smaller scale, it is becoming more common for publications to arise from collaborative projects.
As an early career researcher I can appreciate that team science is not just good for science: it gives those of us embarking on our scientific careers the opportunity to take part in research with high impact that would otherwise not be accessible to us. It can remove the pressure to obtain independent funding – in many cases, all funding will have been obtained as part of the larger project’s grant.
Most read on Naturejobs: February 2016
Two posts this week prove that the value of a PhD means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Here’s your favourite content from February.
Dr. Peter Fiske explains how a PhD is useful not just for companies looking to recruit scientists, but for those looking to fill other business-oriented roles in the private sector. That doctorate could cover you even further than you thought.
The faculty series: What does it take to be a mentor?
Being a great M.E.N.T.O.R will help you just as much as your students, says Nirmala Hariharan
Guest contributor Nirmala Hariharan
Mentoring is one of the most crucial roles played by faculty on a day to day basis. As a mentor, you provide scientific and technical guidance, and serve as the pillar of support for your team of students, postdocs and trainees. Mentoring can consume a lot of your time, and be very demanding, but has several long term benefits that will help you run a successful lab. Here’s what a great M.E.N.T.O.R provides for their students.
Nirmala Hariharan
Motivation. You’re the constant source of motivation for your team; you need to see the big picture and guide your team through the ups and downs. You’re the leader that inspires excellence and encourages scientific innovation. As a good mentor, you must recognise the true potential of your mentees – even if they don’t – and know how to bring out the best in them. In short, you should make them realise what they’re capable of.
The faculty series: Balancing the books
It is important to get the balance between your different responsibilities right when starting your academic post, John Tregoning suggests some ninja tips to help you choose.
{credit} John Tregoning {/credit}
Guest contributor John Tregoning
So you have just read my first blog post, Nobody rides for free, and have come to terms with the idea that academia is more than just research. Now you face a dilemma – how best to add value and still be productive. One of the biggest challenges facing early stage academics is not over-diluting your effort and getting the balance of activities right. Whilst everyone is different and the balance can change over the trajectory of a career, with teaching/grants predominant early on and admin/impact coming later, the following approaches can help you to decide how best to spend your time.
Mentoring. You are not the first person to start a career and academics love to give advice. The simple act of talking through problems can often clarify the solutions. Find someone local, trustworthy (and ideally not your boss) who is willing to give up a bit of their time and sound them out. If you can’t find someone, many institutions now have mentoring schemes to help guide you through the maze. “At my university, new faculty are enrolled into a formal mentorship programme,” says Jamie Mann, assistant professor at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. “This non-supervisory process ensures new faculty members can access the critical support and assistance of more experienced colleagues, enabling new recruits to better achieve their professional goals.” Don’t limit yourself to one person; it may be that you get prudent political advice from one professor and great grantsmanship guidance from another. Continue reading
Mentoring: Before they were laureates
Mentors create environments where early career researchers can grow and develop.
Contributor Michael Gatchell
{credit}Istockphoto/ThinkStock{/credit}
For a young scientist the possibilities are endless, but a good mentor can make all of the difference in helping their career off to the right start.
Those who choose to become scientists can often point out one or several people who influenced them and started them on the journey that is their career. Already at an early stage in one’s education, there can be that one professor who made a longstanding impact. Even seemingly small actions make a big difference. This was the case for 2008 Nobel laureate in chemistry, Martin Chalfie. He fondly remembers a special teacher while he was an undergraduate student at Harvard, who personally ensured that Chalfie had a key to the library and could read the papers needed for a course. “He went out of his way — that was a wonderful thing,” Chalfie says.
The first experience that many people have of actually practicing science is during graduate school. The advisors naturally take on the role as mentors and create an environment where they can grow. This can be manifested in many different ways. For Brian Schmidt, winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics, having frequent meetings with his PhD supervisor at Harvard were important. “Every morning I would bring in a plot of what I did the day before and we would talk it over,” he says. “He really imprinted lots of how to do science to me.” Continue reading
Mentoring: The perspective of Nobel Laureates
The first of a three-part series on the mentoring experiences from Nobel Laureates.
Contributor Michael Gatchell
{credit}Getty Images{/credit}
One group of people that have experienced the greatest thrills science has to offer has to be the Nobel laureates.
Science is about discovering and understanding the unknown. To do this you need an open mind and follow paths that no one else has walked down before. The classes you take as a student and books you read provide the basic knowledge, but it is the interactions with people around you that mold you into a true scientist — ready to take on the greatest problems that nature has in store.
Every Laureate has a unique story of making choices along a nonlinear career path. But as any of them will tell you, it is important to have an ensemble of mentors that you trust for advice at any point along the way, not only when you are young and inexperienced. “You cannot learn science from books — you have to learn science from other people, who give you the right imprint,” says Carlo Rubbia, 1984 Nobel Laureate in physics. Continue reading
How important is it to have a mentor in your academic career?
Choosing your career path is a difficult one. Doing it on your own is even more so. Having someone to talk to and share your concerns/challenges/ideas with can be extremely beneficial. The official term for someone like that is a Mentor. At the Naturejobs Career Expo in London this September, a panel of four academics got together to discuss their wildly different careers: Jim Usherwood from the Royal Veterinary College only spends his time doing research. Anita Hall from Imperial College London only does teaching. Lorraine Kerr and Louise Horsfall from the University of Edinburgh split their time (with different percentages) between research, teaching, business and management.
One of the questions our audience posed to them was: “How important is it to have a mentor in your academic career?” Here are their responses.
Usherwood suggests speaking to the postdocs – they’re the ones that do the research and will give you a “reality check”. By approaching many postdocs you can get lots of different opinions.
Hall has found that having a mentor to whom you can relate is very valuable. Don’t reach for the Nobel Laureate, go for someone who’s done one more postdoc position than you, or who has started their postdoc after their PhD.
Horsfall disagrees with Usherwood: “if you’re aiming for an academic position, you don’t want to go to a postdoc because they haven’t got the academic position either.” She suggests working with the university mentor schemes that are provided by universities. “It’s just an encouragement from somebody who is outside your immediate situation. They can give a different perspective.”
Mentors are a big discussion topic in the science career space. We’ve talked about the issue before:
Mentoring: More than just a pair of hands
Read more about How to navigate an academic career and about all the other conference sessions and workshops at the Naturejobs Career Expo in London.