Yesterday I did an interview on mentoring with Yadéeh Sawyer from the STEM Gateway Program. She asked me an interesting question: “What are the most rewarding aspects of being a mentor?”. My responses about the rewards of mentoring centered around seeing the mentee succeed at what they are doing. I’ve watched students go from the very beginning of their research to presenting first-rate talks at regional and national meetings. Most of this is their hard work, but I like to think that the encouragement I gave along the way helped make this happen. I also find it rewarding to see their faces light up when they find out they’ve been awarded their first grant. Probably most rewarding to me is the actual conversations with students and mentees. It’s really fun to look at a set of data with a student and find the story the data are telling us. We do this in my lab group in lab meeting. This fall we’re going to tackle the Parashant data set, which contains data on microbes from a variety of caves and one mine, which are all very different. The project was a survey that we were commissioned to do and thus didn’t start with a hypothesis in mind. Watching the student-led discussion of different figures illustrating trends in the data is rewarding. What starts as a discussion with a lot of dead ends and frustration, gradually begins to coalesce into a publishable study over time. That warms the cockles of my heart and gives me the sense that mentoring is all worth it!
To all the amazing mentors out there–what do you find most rewarding? Please share your thoughts by commenting on this post.