The meandering path to a career in science offers challenges that can be difficult to confront alone. Finding an effective mentor who offers advice and inspiration can help you navigate the maze successfully, say Andrew Gaudet and Laura Fonken.
Laura Fonken
Andrew Gaudet
https://youtu.be/1ZnyQ5aKR0o
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.
Una Ryan
Naturejobs is celebrating Women in Science. Every day this week we’re interviewing an inspirational female scientist. Yesterday, we spoke to Roma Agrawal, structural engineer at WSP.
Today we’re in conversation with Una Ryan, the Chair of the Bay Area Bioeconomy Initiative and an angel investor in the San Francisco Bay Area. I met Una at a SynBioBeta event at Imperial College London in April this year, where she chaired an all-male panel on the venture capital climate in the Bay Area, and how it differs to that in the UK. Una was disappointed that the panel was comprised entirely of men, but noted that unfortunately there aren’t many female biotech venture capital investors to choose from.
This is something that Una is hoping to change. She invests a huge amount of time in young scientists—both male and female—to support them through their careers. I spoke to Una after her panel event to find out about how she became interested in science, and how she is hoping to inspire others.
By J.T. Neal, contributor
With a bit of structure and extra effort, both mentor and mentee can gain more from the experience.
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Our lab, like many labs, has been buzzing with high school and undergraduate summer students over the last several weeks. Many of these students have never set foot in a lab before, and this lack of training, coupled with a mentor’s already busy schedule, can lead to occupying junior mentees only with menial tasks, or worse, make-work (think organizing the lab chemicals alphabetically.) With summer winding down, I’ve taken some time to think about what I’ve learned from mentoring these students, to reflect on my own experiences as an undergraduate mentee, and to come up with a few tips to help new mentors and mentees make the most of the experience. Continue reading