Being a Good Mentee
I am at a stage of my career where I have accumulated not only experience as a mentee (i.e., someone who is being mentored), I am now serving as a mentor in an official capacity. As a newer mentor, I am learning some startling truths about the role: I am an imperfect person trying to serve as a role model for another, and no one trains you to be a mentor. Having started this journey, I reflect on my previous mentee experiences and realize that I could have been more intentional in how I received mentorship. It would seem that there could be a better way of being a mentee, and thus be able to increase the benefit of mentorship. Here is my personal meditation on what it could mean to be a better mentee.
Enjoying a sendoff from my Post-doctoral lab with my mentor, Dr. Lauren Ehrlich
There are few examples of the mentor-mentee relationship available to us, so we commonly fall back on the relationship archetypes that we encounter: parent-child, teacher-student, and boss-employee. Depending on the type of mentoring structure, there may be much in common between mentoring and these relationships, yet it would be a mistake to model a mentoring relationship purely based on any of these modes.
Mentoring should be less personal and intimate than parenting, though certainly in academia, this line can be blurred because the child/mentee is given a disproportionate amount of the benefit, while the parent/mentor’s primary gain is the satisfaction of giving support and serving a greater purpose. However, parents have a much greater and more personal stake in their children’s outcomes than a mentor would for a mentee. Mentoring can certainly come from teachers and bosses, and it often does; it is distinguished because in the latter cases, there is often an exchange of money for services rendered, while a mentoring relationship often gives you a chance to grow by emulating some facet of the mentor’s career and unique professional attributes.
In my opinion, mentor relationships in general are not well-defined or appreciated, and thus we fail to use them to their full potential. This feeds forward into a general practice of inefficient mentoring and a new generation of mentees that don’t realize how beneficial a mentor can be. I still have a way to go to learn about being a good mentor, but I have realized that being a good mentee could also greatly improve the relationship. To this end, I have formed 4 points to think about when embarking on a relationship with a mentor:
Outline your desired outcome
With regards to professional mentors, there are about 3 different categories of outcomes that could be reasonably expected, which roughly correlate to the degree of difference between the mentor and mentee:
The apprentice and the master—The mentee is very new to the field and has matched with a mentor in order to embark on a long-term process of obtaining their own expertise. These are the most traditional and well-recognized mentoring relationships.
Peers and colleagues—Within an organization’s hierarchy, the two parties are roughly matched in rank, but the mentor may have slightly more experience or specialized knowledge and thus can support the mentee’s growth. Or, the two can be of similar rank from different organizations, and likewise one may support the other in a mentorship manner in a particular area. Because of the similarity in status, these are often unofficial mentoring relationships.
The expert witness—The difference between the mentor and mentee can be as great as that seen between apprentice and master. However, the mentor is more of a satellite to the mentee’s career development; they are not as active of a participant in the mentee’s trajectory and instead contribute in a niche way.
As the mentee, once you have recognized that a person is serving as a mentor in your life, whether in an official capacity or not, decide what category your relationship will become. From there, you must determine your expectation for your mentor: will they help you achieve your Ph.D.? Help you write your research statement for a job search? Provide a job introduction to the company you are interested in? Even if you cannot think of anything concrete you need at the moment, by having classified your mentor/mentee relationship, it will help you determine how much you could reasonably expect to ask of their person’s experience and time, and how much you should reciprocate.
Determine the level of interaction needed to achieve your outcome
The level of interaction depends on the scale of the desired outcome; for big projects (e.g., completing a Ph.D.) the relationship is so important that it must be official. For some mentors, the objective is less concrete; perhaps the mentor is an accomplished individual in your field, and so having established them in your network can potentially assist you in the future. Though the scope of these outcomes is dramatically different, the general approach to interactions should be very similar—it will mainly differ based on how frequent the engagement will be. For example, for a Ph.D. mentor, there should be regular meetings (weekly, biweekly) to discuss day-to-day progress. For a professional networking connection, this could be an annual catch-up. Thus, while the frequency of the contact is dependent on the scale of the outcome desired, the content of the interaction should still have the same general characteristics (see the next point).
Discuss the small picture and big picture of your desired outcome
You should be roughly aware of the small picture (day-to-day steps you need to take to accomplish your goal) and the big picture (greater milestones that mark your progress toward the goal) of your desired outcome. Your plan can be rough because this is what the mentor is here to provide advice on. For the example of the Ph.D. student mentee, the small picture consists of experiments performed, papers read, and the content being written. The mentee brings forth these activities to receive constructive criticism from an expert. For the example of the networking colleague, the small picture consists of the mentee’s current scholarship or job activities.
Where I believe people fall short is that they do not consider the big picture: the Ph.D. student and their mentor solely focus their discussions on weekly experimental progress, that they fail to consider if this is leading toward a dissertation defense in the next couple of years; the networking colleagues chat about their current tangible tasks, but fail to discuss their long-term career prospects, thus impairing their ability to offer each other assistance. As a mentee, try to structure your interactions with the mentor so that you are touching on at least some aspect of the big picture, which will cue your mentor to focus their efforts towards your desired outcome.
Clarify how you can assist your mentor
Presumably, your mentor is not your parent, and so they should be receiving some benefit in return from their service, even if it is intangible. This does not need to be conducted at every contact, but this could be part of your consideration during your big picture thinking exercise: perhaps a student could share the fact that they are receiving a positive mentoring experience with others (“I learned so much about…. from Prof. X, I recommend their course”); a colleague can give thanks (“I found it very helpful when we discussed…”); a mentee could alert the mentor to some resource (“I saw this article and thought it may be helpful to you based on our previous discussions”). These small inputs boost the quality of the mentorship experience, creating a mutual relationship from what could end up being an act of thankless service. In addition, even small inputs could likely invigorate the mentor’s reserves and increase their mentoring bandwidth!
Enjoying a beautiful Austin sunset with my previous mentor and lab manager.
I could not have made it as far as I have today without mentors. My only regret is that I did not consider what it meant to be a good mentee much earlier. While I offer structured suggestions on being a good mentee, your approach does not need to be so rigid; the beauty of mentorship is that it is free-flowing, like any human relationship. In the end, if we keep our own goals in mind, and also consider how we can help others, we can be good mentees and mentors. Being able to learn and grow from each other is thus one of the most rewarding aspects of professional development.