Saturday, February 12, 2011

Mentorship

I'm a horrible mentor. There, I said it.

Back in August, I told my advisor that I was interested in getting an undergrad helper for my research. There's a school-wide program here that helps undergrads (particularly underclassmen) get started on research by getting in touch with different PIs and their projects. I got to interview the students, and chose one to help me out, so he's been here since mid-September.

Unfortunately I've realized that I'm not very good at thinking of spinoff projects for other people. A few weeks ago, my advisor asked me how everything was going with the undergrad helper -- what was his project exactly? What was he doing? My answer was something among the lines of "he does what I tell him to do," which didn't sit very well with my advisor.
I've been teaching the student various molecular biology techniques, along with an overview of how they fit into the bigger picture of my project, but this approach doesn't work very well, especially if I just dictate what he's supposed to do and watch over his shoulder while he does it.

One of the biggest problems is that I don't trust other people to do "my" work, for fear of things getting messed up. I'm pretty sure my advisor had the same problem with me when I first started working in the lab; it got to the point where my advisor asked another grad student (a year above me) to watch my technique... as in look over my shoulder. When the other student said "but I don't think she's doing anything wrong," my advisor said "well, just in case..."

I'm trying to get the student to see the big picture before he goes off to work, but sometimes I glaze/skip over things that seem second nature to me, without realizing that the student is lost. However, there's a limit to how much "big picture" stuff can be covered before the students lose interest, and many subtleties can only be learned through actually DOING the work.

If I continue mentoring throughout the next school year, hopefully the current student stays in the lab...