Some Thoughts on Mentoring
There have been some great posts on networking and impostor syndrome in the science blogosphere lately, which has prompted me to do some thinking about one of those pieces of advice that always crops up in such discussion: finding a mentor. It’s pretty generally accepted that mentorship matters at every career stage, but as someone early in my career, it seems that the first advice I’m given when I’m struggling is “find a mentor”. One mistake I think most of us make at least once is assuming that because we report to someone, they will serve as our mentor. Maybe it’s because finding a mentor is actually not a straightforward process. I can’t write a flow chart that will consistently find someone a mentor. Personally, I’ve generally found mentors simply by talking to professors outside of class, about something other than class, or talking to professors who I no longer take…
Building Momentum
These past two months have been pretty crazy because it was effectively the playoffs for proposal season (NSF, DARPA, NIST, etc…). For you football fans out there, you can probably appreciate this analogy: I’ve had five completions in 3 weeks and now I’m sitting back and hoping for some nice YAC. That, combined with the time I spent with my students last semester is finally starting to gain traction on its own. The students working in my group don’t have any specific classes that train them to work on my specific research area so I’m left with the task of tutoring and training them in the lab on procedures and whatnot. Basically, my summer and first semester was spent training and acquiring equipment. And I can officially say: My group haz momentum! Yesterday, I was in the lab working on a few things and showing my student some new tips/tricks…
TMI from your Advisor?
One of the things that I think an advisor should do is train their students technically (duh!) but also train them about the social-political-monetary issues of working in a competitive environment. I’m not talking about force my students to be Democrats or Republicans, but rather that they should understand that things are much more interlinked than they might believe. For my students that are pursuing academia, I hope that I’m giving them an accurate representation of what it takes to be in the same role that I’m in. For my students that will end up in industry, I hope this at least gives them some insights and clues for what to look for when they’re deciding on a company. I’ll give you a few examples of what I’m talking about. All of my students (4) are currently paid out of startup money, which I’m using to seed projects that I’m…
Needy Students: The Ultimate Motivator
This week’s theme at Engineer Blogs is motivation and, if you can’t tell from my late post, I’m motivated to work on other things right now. My discussion on this topic is highly linked to a previous Theme Week on Deadlines. In that post, I discussed how I toss in procrastination and deadlines, and mix it with pressure and a dash of biting-off-more-than-you-can-chew and come out in reasonable shape (when it’s all over). GMP had a comment that she worked in a similar fashion, so I was somewhat relieved to find out I wasn’t the only one. When it comes down to it, I think I’m most motivated by not wanting to let other people down. I’d like to think that I’m the person that comes through 10 times out of 10 (SHAFT!). That doesn’t mean I’m always successful (hence my recent proposal rejection) but in the context of coming through in the end, I’m…
Pace of Grad School
Currently, I’m out of town attending a workshop with some very specialized people in an area in which I’m trying to make inroads. And while I won’t bore you with the details (I knew people could have such levels of nuance), I will share with you a comment that I heard over drinks. Let me paint the picture for you a little bit first. I was having a discussion with someone very high up in the food chain about current/potential/future projects. This person asked a very specific technical question related to the problem, something that would mean significant money for the company that person represents if possible. I, wanting to hold on to my ideas, remained steadfast with a response like “Talk to me in 18 months when we have it working in the lab.” This is basically a nice way of saying like hell I’m going to let you…
I’d like to thank all the big people
This week’s theme on Engineer Blogs relates to networking and finding jobs. I have both worked in the Real World™ as well as being a grad student and an engineer in an academic research group. My experience getting jobs before I returned to school in my mid-twenties was almost bi-polar. People didn’t go so much on recommendations, and most of the jobs I applied for were in the paper. (Yes, back before the internet became the world’s largest classified ad.) I was living in southern California at the time, so that meant, of course, that I had a hard time getting jobs because I was usually competing against several hundred applicants. I had an easy time getting jobs that I didn’t want and that didn’t pay well, but it was very difficult to find jobs I actually enjoyed. The low spot was spending a year working as a secretary at…