Mentoring: It ’s In Our Genes

Anyone who’s spent time in an academic science lab has probably heard about lab culture. Many labs boast long, rigorous working hours, while others require graduate students and postdoctoral trainees (postdocs) to meet often-unattainable experiment quotas each week. But is sheer quantity really the gold standard we want to hold ourselves to when it comes to training the next generation of scientists? The #MentorFirst logo. Credit: www.MentorFirst.org. Neil Garg, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor and chair of the department of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), and Jen Heemstra, Ph.D., Charles Allen Thomas Professor and chair of the department of chemistry at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, think not. In fact, they both felt so strongly that this mindset of training is so outdated and detrimental to academic excellence and integrity that they joined together to create #MentorFirst, an initiative encouraging academics to embrace mentorship in conjunction with research. “As faculty, both research and mentorship are important,” says Dr. Heemstra. “But it makes a huge difference which one we put first.” Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Garg says a group of students approached him about challenges they were facing, including finding their place in the swiftly changing and complicated world around them. One student had told him, “I want to know that my professor sees that I’m more important as a huma...
Source: Biomedical Beat Blog - National Institute of General Medical Sciences - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Being a Scientist STEM Education Training Source Type: blogs