A One-Stop Shop to Gain Competence in Academic Mentoring

Book Reviews / Mentoring

Mentoring is a complex art, full of subtle interpersonal queues. Add to that the subtleties of navigating an academic environment, and mentoring can sometimes seem overwhelming. On top of that, many of those in today’s PhD programs are focused on jobs outside of academia, which can make the mentor’s task even more difficult. How can a mentor combine all these challenges for a successful outcome?

To answer, Maria LaMonaca Wisdom, assistant vice provost for faculty advancement at Duke University, offers her insights from career coaching in academic circles. She aims to make readers competent in career coaching for any mentee in academia, whether or not their career plans align with your personal interests.

How is that even possible? LaMonaca Wisdom advocates an approach to mentoring as a coach, instead of an all-knowing, all-powerful boss. Thus, the mentor’s job centers on bringing out self-efficacy and self-reliance in the mentee. Asking the penetrating questions – or just asking questions in the first place – to a mentee becomes a premium instead of providing the right answers.

This shift represents a relatively new practice in academe. It used to be that research faculty produced the next generation of research faculty. However, tenure-track faculty jobs have become harder to come by in recent years, and mentors have had to learn to coach outside of their personal experiences.

Plenty of professional coaching resources exist, but most mentors cannot afford the time and expense required to become a certified coach, like LaMonaca Wisdom has. Therefore, she distills this training into this book with an eye on the academic setting. She herself is a former literature professor who originally wanted to go into the teaching track, instead of the research track. She eventually grew passionate about academic advising, a path which led her to a role in professional coaching.

Of note, self-care is a defining component in her approach. Emotional and personal health represents the prime attribute that a mentor can offer a mentee since the mentor can’t completely predict the mentee’s career journey. She advocates a personal, not hierarchical, approach to mentoring driven by healthy curiosity, psychological boundaries, and continual growth.

Honestly, I found this conversational approach welcoming and helpful. The “all-knowing mentor” approach has always turned me off in the past, and I’ve benefited more from mentors willing to invest in me more pastorally than formally. Relationships, not hierarchies, seem to matter in today’s fluid world, and it’s time that academics learn how to capitalize on this strategy.

To date, this book is the best I’ve read about how to pursue this approach in an academic setting. Not only does it clearly recognize dynamics in today’s academy, but it also represents an honest, sustainable approach to mentoring. I fully recommend reading it if you want to bring your mentoring approach in sync with today’s challenges.

How to Mentor Anyone in Academia
By Maria LaMonaca Wisdom
Copyright © 2025
Princeton University Press
ISBN13 9780691248714
Page Count: 264

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Getting an Edge through Mentorship

Book Reviews / Mentoring

Traditional mentorship programs tend to be organized via a hierarchy, with mentees being assigned a mentor to advance mentees’ careers. Under imprecise rubrics like “peer mentoring” or “lateral mentoring,” recent attention has focused on how key mentorships happen outside of institutional programs. Deborah Heiser started an organization called The Mentor Project to promote relationships with mentees that grow out of an accomplished veteran’s innate desire to give back. In The Mentorship Edge, she proposes that organizations best enable mentoring relationships by facilitating connections rather than by focusing on career advancement.

Like other books about mentoring, this book is filled with stories about unique ways this group’s mentees and mentors have connected. Mentorship books seem to collect stories of mentors going the extra mile to help a mentee. That’s the fun part because these noteworthy aspects seem to be the norm in healthy mentoring relationships. We all want to go the extra mile to help someone taste success.

Two sections stood out to me in this book. First, as a researcher centered in psychology, she grounds mentorship in Erik Erikson’s leading theory of adult development in her introduction. There’s a lot to his theory, but his description of a later life phase of “generativity” overlaps with mentorship. Wanting to give back through socially meaningful activities is a completely normal part of being an adult. We all do it, and we don’t need to don a superhero cape to mentor. Heiser captures this generative impulse that we all possess to describe what mentorship should be about. I appreciate the philosophical grounding of mentorship as a universal human need.

Second, the chapter on Mentoring in the Workplace caught my interest. Individual stories of healthy relationships certainly move me, but I’m interested in learning how mentorship scales in different industries. Through true-to-life narratives, she breaks down how mentoring can work in industries as different as healthcare, the military, and the law. She demonstrates how a lateral generativity can help even in the most vertical of environments.

By way of critique, I dislike her use of the term “lateral mentoring.” First, she puts a trademark sign every time she uses it. This unconventional branding distracts from the main message of the book. Most technical terms do not use a trademark, especially in a scientific environment. It speaks of capitalism, not scientific collegiality. Second, she tries to distinguish it from “peer mentoring” by claiming that peer mentoring is more emotional. In the field of biomedical research, this claim is untrue. Peer mentoring in the literature refers to what she refers to as lateral mentoring. Instead of acknowledging different uses, she tries to steer us to her trademarked term. This use raises my cynicism.

Nonetheless, this book paints a picture of how mentoring relationships can abound around us, and how naturally they can form (or something related to the “generativity” idea). While this book contains limited quantitative data, abundant qualitative stories illustrate her key observation that mentoring relationships stem from the mentor’s human need for generativity. I appreciate that her vision for mentorship is not limited to a fixed, hierarchical program but a culture of human relationships where we all help one another. In my experience, the best mentoring relationships are unplanned but grounded in human care.

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Having Difficult Conversations

Communication / Doing Research / Management & Leadership / Mentoring

No matter how in tune you are with your colleagues, at some point, you’ll find yourself in conflict and needing to have a difficult conversation. In my leadership roles at VUMC and elsewhere, I’ve had plenty. Here are some strategies for making these conversations less stressful and coming out with a win for all sides.

First, what is a difficult conversation? Of course, it’s anything hard to talk about. Self-esteem of one or both parties is often at risk, and important issues are at stake. Often, when you’re having a difficult conversation, you care deeply about the other person or people. These conversations can center on a host of issues that may involve misunderstandings, assumptions, a clash of values, or a perception of unfair treatment. Some examples in science include:

  • A postdoc skips regular meetings with the group leader. The leader lets it slide, and then the postdoc attempts to publish on their own.
  • Authorship order and inclusion is not established early.
  • Trainee projects and roles aren’t clearly defined, leading to conflict instead of cooperation.
  • Someone in the lab isn’t doing their fair share of work.

When an issue like this arises, you have a few choices for responding. You can remain silent—but silence can take an emotional toll, and the issue can simmer until it explosively erupts. You can respond immediately—but then your response may become confrontational and/or unproductive. Or you can respond later, giving yourself time to think, but there is some risk with waiting too long.

Take a deep breath. Ask yourself these questions:

  • What is the importance of the issue and the relationship?
  • How does it make you and the other person feel?
  • What does this say about me and my identity?
  • What do I really want?
  • What do I want for others?
  • What do I want for this relationship?
  • Is this something I can possibly resolve with the other party, or will we need help?
  • What are the options?

Each difficult conversation is really three separate conversations: 1) What happened? 2) How does it make the people involved feel? 3) What does this say about our identities?

“What happened” is often a matter of perspective. Consider the picture to the right. Just because the person who thinks the number is a six is correct doesn’t mean the person who thinks it’s a nine is wrong. Both have their own perspectives. Assigning blame early is rarely productive.

Many people are reluctant to talk about feelings at work, but avoiding any discussion of how an incident made you feel can cause you to miss some important underpinnings of the conflict. How each party feels has implications for their identities. If someone is concerned about being perceived as a bad person, it’s hard to have a productive conversation.

Curiosity helps immensely in these situations. Try to set aside your preconceptions and learn more about the situation. Some things you might say:

  • Tell me more about…
  • My point of view is different. Can you help me understand…?
  • Help me understand your intent when you said/did…
  • What were you feeling when…?
  • Let’s figure this out together

Listen to learn, not just to respond. Bring empathy and grace for yourself as well as the other party. Acknowledge that impact often does not equal intention (and vice versa).

Here’s an example of this process in action: Imagine you are a radiologist like me. You’re performing an ultrasound on a pregnant person and a medical student is with you. You can’t find the fetal heartbeat, and the mom, knowing something is wrong, starts to cry. The medical student rushes from the room.

You could assume the student is uncaring about their patients. You could even say this to the student. But if you listen to learn, you might instead say, “I noticed you left when the patient started crying. Can you help me understand what was going on?” And you might learn that the student had a miscarriage three weeks ago. The initial assumption no longer makes much sense.

Stay curious and aim for the most respectful interpretation of others’ behavior. Let that curiosity lead you in these interactions and frame these conversations.

I am a certified Leadership and Performance Coach and have mentored and coached over 130 physicians and other individuals. Having a curious and open mindset is essential to coaching. I have published multiple peer-reviewed papers and have given national invited presentations on mentorship and coaching. My mission is to help physicians, scientists, and other individuals achieve personal and professional growth and fulfillment. Please feel free to reach out to me at Lori.deitte@vumc.org if you are interested in learning more.

Some of the information in this post comes from Crucial Conversations by Joseph Grenny, Kerry Patterson, Ron McMillan, Al Switzler, and Emily Gregory, and Difficult Conversations by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen. Check them out for more tips and strategies to make these kinds of conversations go well.

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Being Your Own Mentor Matchmaker

Mentoring

Career development grants typically describe how they select ideal mentors for the training program. This post unpacks those concepts as steps for individuals to use when seeking mentors for our own research careers.

Basics:

  • Don’t make assumptions based only on academic reputation.
  • Don’t restrict yourself to assigned mentors.
  • Do assume you will want mentors across your entire career.

Gather personal impressions:

Reach out to current and prior mentees of mentor candidates you are considering. If interviewing for a job, request an opportunity to talk with members of the research group. Consider it a warning sign if these contacts aren’t forthcoming.

Understand existing mentoring structures (or create them):

Discuss how mentoring is organized in the research team and in the larger organization. Mentor panels are considered best practice. Panels, much like dissertation committees, should include three to five individuals with varied content and methodologic expertise relevant to your work from within and outside your department and immediate research team. This can be formalized for applying for career development opportunities or an informal circle of advisors as your career progresses.

Seek useful online information:

  • NIH RePORTER catalogues a range of sources of federal funding and is searchable by name and institution for both current and past funding. Stable funding suggests the research environment will have longevity.
  • CVs and biosketches often appear online and sites like Google Scholar and NCBI My Bibliography offer snapshots of research productivity and conventional measures of impact.
  • Look for a website for the research group and check for how trainees are included and acknowledged.
  • Search university and national news for useful insights about recognition.

Ensure at least one senior mentor has these traits:

  • Collaborative skills as evidenced by 1) success guiding research teams that include peers, trainees, and staff; and 2) experience developing funding resources to link investigators in new ways such as program project grants, large scale contracts, national research networks, or consortia or leadership of institutional resources such as centers.
  • Familiarity with campus resources including assisting trainees with accessing resources such as use of cores, pilot funding, specialized training opportunities, travel funds, and expert consultation.
  • Strong track record with prior mentees assessed by career progression of the student, fellow, or faculty members whom they mentor including breadth of opportunities, experience during training, job placement, publication, and funding history of the mentee. Consider these outcomes even if you will be at a more senior level when you become a mentee. Treatment of all types of mentees is a good barometer.
  • Recognition of dedication to structured mentoring assessed by asking if the candidate mentor has roles on training grants such as T32s or K12s, or for individual F or K or other career development awards.
  • Commitment to the highest standards in personal professionalism, responsible conduct of research, and participation in cross-cutting mentor training. CVs can provide details about participation in related seminars and speaking engagements and a record of participating in training activities.
  • Awareness of challenges facing mentees such as stressors, needs, and experiences of bias, alongside experience assisting trainees in navigating and seeking solutions for personal and professional challenges. This requires conversations with current or prior mentees.

Don’t skip gathering information when you seek mentors. It may be the most important research you do in advancing your career.

Related:

Not that Kind of Committee: Tales of Faculty Committee Design

How to Choose a Lab and Mentor According to #AcademicTwitter

What You Should Expect from Mentors

Captain Your Own Ship

Katherine E. Hartmann, MD, PhD
Associate Vice President for Research, Clinical & Translational Science
Director, Center for Clinical & Translational Science
Associate Dean, Research Development & Synergy, College of Medicine
University of Kentucky

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A Dynamic Daily Devotional of Mentoring

Book Reviews / Mentoring

I love books whose contents far surpass their titles, and this one fits that bill to a tee. At first glance, it seems to have a gimmicky organization. I’m not a big personal fan of reading lists, and the thought of trudging through 75 short recommendations on mentoring frankly reminds me of having teeth pulled. However, upon second glance, I discovered that the book is in a third edition, so someone must have liked the first two enough for a publisher to invest in a third. After being recommended the book and pondering further, I took the bait and got it. Almost 250 pages later, I’m glad I had the chance to read it.

This book reminds me of religious devotional books that I read as a high school student, except this book doesn’t deal with personal character directly but instead one’s ability to develop others’ professional character. Each of the 75 chapters consist of a handful of pages – short but power-packed. I actually had to limit the number of chapters I could read in one sitting because the book left me with so much to think about! It easily can fit with the practice of reading one short chapter per day…if you can limit yourself to only one.

The book’s title takes inspiration from Strunk and White’s famous Elements of Style that, decades after publication, remains the go-to book for good writing in the English language. Spinning off that legacy, these authors want to identify what skills make a good mentor. The authors, both professors of psychology at research universities have reviewed 2,000 publications to identify specific reasons why mentorship is so effective.

Chapters are organized into seven larger sections on topics like skills, style, starting, diversity, and integrity. I’m involved in a handful of professional and personal mentoring relationships, and even though topics explicitly veer towards workplace concerns, readers can easily extract life concerns for personal betterment, too. The best way to develop better mentees, no matter the field, is to become a better mentor.

Mentoring is tough. To the uninitiated observer, mentors seem to receive tons of adulation from adoring mentees. In truth, mentors, like teachers, often are underappreciated, aren’t financially well-rewarded for their mentorship, and give to mentees way more than they receive. Yet almost universally, mentoring yields satisfaction and happiness that aren’t easily quantifiable. Research says that good mentorship leads to more career success among mentees. As the authors put it,

Mentoring becomes a way of life for outstanding mentors for two basic reasons. They delight in seeing their mentees succeed. … They also reap rich internal rewards; they know that few things compare in personal fulfillment as the positive outcomes of their investment in mentees.

This responsibility can elicit some nervousness among mentors. Educating oneself on how to mentor can calm those nerves and identify good practices to cling to. This book is easily the most thought-provoking, concise reference that I’ve read on this topic. It’s suitable for researchers, academics, and leaders who spend their lives developing the next generation’s professional skills.

The Elements of Mentoring: 75 Practices of Master Mentors, 3rd Edition, by W. Brad Johnson and Charles R. Ridley.

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The Art of Being Helpful: Mentor vs. Coach vs. Advisor vs. Sponsor

Mentoring

Imagine that someone you’ve been mentoring for the past few years walks into your office one day and says, “Thank you so much for being a great mentor to me. I was thinking about applying for a leadership position that just opened up. What do you think?”

You remember that you went through a similar situation earlier in your career. During that time, your mentor was very helpful to you in navigating the decision, and you would like to be of similar assistance. How might you go about being helpful?

At the University of Utah, Dr. Harriet Hopf and I lead a community of faculty advancing the practice of coaching and mentoring. We defined four roles that are essential to developing someone’s career: mentor, coach, advisor, and sponsor. These roles serve distinct functions, and a person can take on one or more roles in their relationships. We distinguish these four roles using the dimensions of questions vs. answers and internally vs. externally driven.

Questions vs. Answers

Let’s return to the earlier example. Your mentee asks, “I was thinking about applying for a leadership position that just opened up. What do you think?” What would be your response?

A: I don’t think you should do it until you get to a later stage in your career. (giving an answer)

B: How might this role advance or hinder your career goals? (asking a question)

In this case, the more generally appropriate response would be to ask a question, thus taking on the role of coach or mentor. To give an answer without understanding the fuller context would be presumptuous.

However, if the mentee asked instead, “I was thinking about applying for a leadership position that just opened up. Since you’ve had a similar leadership position, could you tell me some of the skills such a position may require?”

In this case, acting as an advisor and giving an answer may be entirely appropriate. The idea is to be aware of when asking a question versus giving an answer may be helpful.

Internally vs. Externally Driven

Let’s say your mentee asks, “Since you know many of the people in that department, would you be willing to introduce me to a few of them? That might help my candidacy for the leadership position.”

In this case, the onus of the action is not on the mentee, but on you if you choose to accept the request. If you were to act, you would be acting in the role of a sponsor. Let’s label this type of help “externally driven.”

But let’s pretend the mentee says, “I’m not sure I’m qualified for the position. I think there are many other people who have more experience.”

In this case, you notice that the mentee’s confidence is low, and you want to help by boosting their confidence. Because the onus of action is ultimately still on the mentee, these approaches would be considered “internally driven.” You may ask the mentee about times where he or she successfully exhibited leadership skills in the past (an example of coaching), or talk about the mentee’s favorable qualifications relative to the demands of the role (an example of advising). Both coaching and advising would have the effect of boosting the mentee’s confidence.

Putting It Together: The Four Roles

In a given situation, there are different ways that you could be helpful. You can ask questions, or you can give answers. You can focus on externally driven actions and perspectives or on internally driven clarity and knowledge. The four roles of mentor, coach, advisor, and sponsor inform each other.

One perspective I would offer is to start with the coaching role and ask more questions initially. From there, if you were to pivot to the other three roles, the strong connection and context that coaching builds strengthens the effectiveness of the other roles.

We hope that this article has shown that there are different approaches you can take in being helpful in your developmental relationships. Your ability to choose the right approach will result in a more satisfactory relationship with those you are seeking to help.

If you would like a deeper description of these roles, visit U-CAN Developmental Relationships Quadrants

Read More

Gaining Experience Mentoring for Diversity

Getting Expectations in Line with an Online Mentoring Agreement

10 Tips for Supervising Research Interns

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Lessons Learned While Building a Research Career: Mentoring Matters

Mentoring

I’ve been building my research career since I finished my clinical training and started in my fellowship lab in 2012. Over the years, I’ve learned some lessons I’ll share in this three-part series. First up: Mentoring Matters.

Choosing mentors and a lab environment for your training years is one of the most important decisions you’ll make as a scientist. Pick an environment where you think you will thrive. For some people, that is a big lab full of post-docs, students, and techs and many projects and publications. For others, it’s a smaller lab with a very focused interest and one-on-one mentor contact. Only you know the type of environment that you need! For me, as a graduate student, I chose a small lab with a hands-on mentor, Dr. Alan Hauser. We studied the intersection between bacterial toxin production and innate immunity using animal models. For my fellowship lab, I wanted exposure to new methods of research in my chosen field of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine. My mentors, Drs. Lorraine Ware and Julie Bastarache, had a lab doing a wide variety of things I had no experience with, ranging from basic research on epithelial barrier function, to translational research with patient samples, and even some clinical trials. I thought that my experience with animal models of infection could bring new techniques to the lab too. Overall, it was clear that I had a tremendous opportunity to learn new skills and take my research in new directions.

Julie and Lorraine are fantastic mentors who are generous with everything. First, their time. Their doors are always open. I’ve knocked on their doors at 7:30 AM and 7:30 PM, called them at home or on weekends, and everything in between. (This isn’t to say a mentor can’t set limits on their time, but having ready access to them when you need them is key.)

Second, their resources. Their willingness to share staff, equipment, space, and money helped me gather my initial preliminary data with extra hands to be productive. This has been indispensable as a new investigator for the times when I didn’t have my own grant funding—because of them, I was able to generate strong grant applications that were successful.

Third, their writing skills. Julie and Lorraine will each read anything I write for any purpose and will provide both big- and little-picture perspectives. I definitely underestimated how much of being a scientist depended on being able to write down your ideas and sell your story. If your mentor isn’t a good editor, make sure you have someone in your life who is.

Finally: work-life balance. Lorraine and Julie modeled ways to integrate work and life. Both of them have children so they understood that we have responsibilities outside of work. Both take time away from lab to go on vacation. I never worried about being judged for taking some time to do something with my spouse or child. They and my other mentors also protected my research time, both from encroachment by outside forces (clinic, committees, etc.) and from myself through overcommitment. The best mentors support you and help you to build your ideal career as a scientist.

Your PIs aren’t the only mentors you need—peer mentorship is critically important too! It’s easier and a lot more fun to succeed in science with help from friends. My clinical colleagues help keep my patient care responsibilities contained. My professional committees have provided mentorship from outside my institution and offered advice that was absolutely critical to my career (some of which I’ll discuss next time). My peers have walked the path of starting my research lab with me. From Shut Up and Write and Aims Review groups in my department, to a campus-wide society of K awardees, and national social media, I’ve been inspired by the exciting work my colleagues are doing and supported through the good and tough times as a scientist. We’ve celebrated successes and navigated common setbacks together with lots of laughs along the way. I encourage everyone to connect with peers and weather the ups and downs of science together. Life is not just the end goal of an R01 or tenure. Life is what we do every day to get to those end goals, and it’s a lot better with friends.

So, as you embark on building your scientific career, identify the mentors, peers, and environment that is best for you to thrive and grow as a scientist!

Additional Resources

The Power of Strong Collaborations

What to Consider When Selecting a Research Mentor

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Getting Expectations in Line with an Online Mentoring Agreement

Mentoring

Excellent communication underlies the mentee-mentor relationship, starting with the initial expectations, goals, and plans to achieve success together. Yet most Mentee-Mentor Agreements used by academic groups define agreements in formal legalese that often poorly fit specific nuances of the pair. The Edge for Scholars team recently revised our Mentee-Mentor Agreement using an interactive online approach to initiate and revisit the important conversations that serve as the building blocks of a solid mentee-mentor relationship.

Built to serve the needs of mentees at any stage (predoc, postdoc, early career faculty), the REDCap-based tool is designed to meet the custom needs of each mentee-mentor pairing. The Mentee-Mentor Agreement asks a series of questions under broad categories.

  • 1:1 Meetings
  • Lab Meetings
  • Communication
  • Mentoring Panel
  • Financial Support
  • Scientific Development
  • Approach to Scholarly Products
  • Career & Professional Development

How does it work?

The mentee logs in to the tool and spends approximately 30-45 minutes answering questions via the online portal. Completion by the mentee initiates an email to the mentor indicating an agreement is ready for review. The mentee and mentor schedule an hour to meet and discuss each question, focusing on those for which mentee and mentor viewpoints do not align  and entering a final and agreed upon response. Once complete, the final agreement is saved and stored in the online portal—editable at any time—and a PDF version may be saved or printed.

We suspect it will be most effective to implement the Mentee-Mentor Agreement within the first three months of a new mentoring relationship. Setting expectations early helps build a strong foundation. Because relationships evolve over time, we designed the agreement with the intention that it is an iterative process. We recommend the pair revisit the tool six months following the initial meeting and then annually thereafter. Doing so will allow the mentee and mentor to confirm expectations are still aligned and meet the needs of both parties; they may also make changes to their agreement as needed. Additionally, a mentee and their mentor may find they are not prepared to answer all sections of the agreement during the initial meeting. For example, it may have been too early in the training to determine who would be best to serve on a mentoring panel or thesis committee. Or, a mentee may not have well-defined scientific or career and professional development goals three months into their training experience. By revisiting the agreement on a regular basis, the mentee and their mentor can work to better define and adjust the agreement, and their relationship.

Please note that for this agreement, in the case of multiple mentors, we suggest that one mentor take the ‘lead’ on this process, at least electronically.  Certainly, we encourage the mentors and mentee to have open dialogue about each of the topics and come to an agreed upon response, but respectfully defer this responsibility to the lead mentor on this agreement and the mentee.

Accessing the Tool

Mentees and mentors may access a scaled-down version of the Mentee-Mentor Agreement at https://redcap.link/ft_mma. The full version of the Mentee-Mentor Agreement is available, with all the bells and whistles,  for groups as a part of Flight Tracker for Scholars through REDCap.

We recognize that with any new tool, revisions to refine it and/or the process may be needed over time, and welcome stakeholder feedback.

Questions? Reach out to us at scott.j.pearson@vumc.org.


Additional Resources

What You Should Expect from Mentors

You Need Mentors – Noun, Plural

The Crosswalk Model: Mentoring and Diversity

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Helping Students Find the Focus of Their Manuscript

Mentoring / Writing & Publishing

Learning how to write a research paper is difficult and takes time, yet it is an integral part of a PhD in STEM. Teaching your students and postdocs how to write good papers is an essential part of being a good supervisor and mentor.

Loose keys from a rainbow coloured computer keyboard

This post is about a particular aspect of writing papers that I noticed many of my students struggle with: Focusing on a specific question. Related to that is the issue of creating a narrative. The source of this struggle is complex and usually more a reflection on how we teach STEM at Universities rather than an individual student’s ability.

In my experience, there are two main sources. First, we rarely teach students to formulate questions and then think of specific experiments and analyses to address them. In most laboratories and tutorial classes, we give students a set of questions and pre-designed experiments or data sets. This is ironic, given that asking questions and designing experiments is the essence of science. Second, in STEM undergraduate courses, students are rarely taught to think of a paper in terms of a narrative or a storyline. We teach students the generic recipe of Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussions and forget to teach them that there still needs to be an overall storyline or focus.

In my field, the difficulty of finding a focus is made worse because of the nature of the raw data our in-silico experiments produce. The data from simulations of biological or chemical systems can be used to calculate a vast array of properties. The analysis you can do seems endless. This is made worse because, in my experience, many students think that the more data or analysis they present in a paper, the better. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case. Instead, when students lose focus on the specific questions that they want to answer, the result is a paper where the signal is lost in the noise. Or, as my former postdoc supervisor and mentor says, “Analysis for the sake of analysis is rarely a good idea.”

I have recently started using the following approach to help students plan their analyses and paper. Once a student has collected data, I asked them to write 1 to 2 pages to answer the following questions.

  • What is the overall question you want to answer in this paper? Or, what is the hypothesis you want to test in this paper?
  • How does this question or hypothesis relate to what we know about this system or problem?
  • What is the minimum data you need to answer your question or test your hypothesis?
  • What specific questions do you need to ask to address your overall questions or hypothesis?
  • For each of the specific questions, what data and what analysis will you use to answer it?
  • How is this data or analysis best presented?
  • How does each datum or analysis relate to the overall question or hypothesis?
  • What does the data tell you with respect to the question or hypothesis?

Based on the answers to these questions, I get the student to map out the Results and Discussion sections. I ask them to produce an outline with the order of all plots and figures and a storyline through which they build their arguments towards answering the overall question. For each plot or figure, the student needs to tell me why it is required to make their argument.

P.S. I understand that sometimes the storyline and argument only emerge as you write. But in my experience, most students need the above support structure before they start writing. This does not mean the paper cannot evolve as you write and edit.

P.S. The idea of writing a scientific paper as a story has its advocates and opponents. Below are two interesting blog posts related to this. While I don’t go as far as thinking of my paper as having characters, settings, actions, climax and resolution, I still find it helpful to think of my paper as having a storyline. I agree with Thomas Basbøll that “It is more efficient to think of your paper as series of claims to be supported, elaborated or defended.” I also like Aimee Edgeworth’s interpretation of a storyline in the context of a research manuscript.

More Resources

The Guiding Principle in Scientific Writing

5 Things That Help Me Write

The Write Rules   

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10 Tips on Providing Feedback to Students

Mentoring / Teaching

This post is inspired by a tweet by @HaPhDsupervisor where she asked, “In your view, what is good supervisor feedback?”

The following 10 tips are based on responses to that tweet and my own experience as a supervisor (and former PhD student).

  1. Ask questions and listen. Ask the student what they want feedback on. For example, if a student sends me a paper, I ask what stage the paper is at and what they want feedback on. The overall structure or the storyline? The presentation of data in the Results section? If the feedback relates to progress in their PhD, I ask first whether they think they are on track, what they think is going well and where they are struggling.
  2. Keep the bigger picture in mind. In my opinion, part of my role as supervisor is to keep the bigger picture in mind and put things into perspective. It is easy for a student to get bogged down in details and think all is lost because that one experiment does not work (I know I felt like that many times during my PhD and I now have my mentor to remind me of that in my own career development). Remind the student how the current experiment or papers fit into their overall PhD.
  3. Suggest tailored actions for the student to implement. Ask the student what they think will help them progress. Suggest actions they can implement and provide a reasonable time frame. Ask them whether they want you to ‘check in’ or leave them for a while. Some students need fixed deadlines and regular reminders (i.e. a bit of pressure). Others feel anxious about that and would like to be left alone until the next meeting or until they seek additional input.
  4. Don’t compare students. People are different, and we all have our strengths and challenges to deal with. Assess progress, or lack thereof, by referring to the student’s milestones or goals and not by comparing them to others.
  5. Keep it balanced and be honest. Acknowledge the student’s effort, tell them where they are going well, and be honest about where they need to improve. Our job as a supervisor is to empower the student. That does not mean you have to make them feel good all the time. Supervision and feedback are about helping the student finish their PhD and develop skills for their future career. In my experience, it helps if you tell the students why you are suggesting certain actions. Use your ‘emotional radar’ when talking about areas they need to improve in. If you feel a student struggles and needs encouragement, maybe wait until the next meeting to talk about difficult issues.
  6. Remind the student they are in charge of their project, but they are not alone. Which part you emphasize depends on the student and their current state of mind. Sometimes students need to be gently reminded that their project is their responsibility and that they need to take actions. At other times, students are committed and focused and need a reminder that it’s ok to not feel on top of things all the time. Tell them that you are here to share the load.
  7. Help them to help themselves. Provide resources and refer them to external help if needed. For example, if a student struggles with writing, provide them with resources on writing skills or suggest they join a local writing group. If they struggle with time management, offer daily planners. I am a fan of the resources from I think well, but there are plenty of other resources out there.
  8. Tell them that struggling is ok. A PhD is not easy, and it is normal to feel overwhelmed, lost, frustrated or stuck. Use examples from your PhD to remind them that what they are experiencing is not unusual.
  9. Adjust your feedback as they progress. At the start of a PhD students usually need more guidance. I try to develop my students into independent researchers that ‘think for themselves’. When they are towards the end of their PhD, I less and less tell them what to do but ask them, ‘what do you think you should do next?’
  10. Be accountable. I try to provide feedback on drafts within a week, 2 weeks maximum. I don’t always succeed, but I communicate it honestly if I know I can’t do it in the usual time frame. If possible, I deliver something the student can work on.

More Resources

Microaffirmations

Triggering Shame vs. Stimulating Curiosity

Teaching Tips Roundup

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