Mentoring Overview

Why does mentoring matter?

Mentoring is the key for developing and sustaining a satisfying professional career. Mentoring enables each of us to grow, learn, transform and accomplish our goals in basic, clinical and translational research. Whether you are a senior, world renowned investigator or in the early stages of your professional training and just beginning to explore exciting new areas of multidisciplinary research--whether you are the mentor or the mentee--mentoring helps to build a dynamic community while ensuring the success of each individual as he or she achieve personal and professional career goals.

What are the benefits of mentoring?

For the mentee:

In order to successfully navigate today's complex and often highly competitive world of biomedical research, having a mentor can be the difference between success and failure. Whether seeking advice on how to ask the right research question, or how to best design a new clinical research trial, or ensuring that all the needed resources are on hand to undertake an important study, mentoring can help to ensure a successful outcome. By serving in the role of a guide, a coach and/or ally, a mentor can answer questions as they arise for the mentee and, thereby, ensure steady progress and completion of project milestones. By serving in the role of an advocate, a mentor can help a mentee navigate the terrain of academia and move forward professionally. By providing knowledgeable and strategic advice, the support provided by a mentor can serve to empower a junior investigator to undertake a new approach or innovative opportunity. Often the interest and support of a mentor provides the mentee with confidence to under take a new and exciting challenge.

For the mentor:

Mentoring provides numerous benefits to the mentor that include enhancement of his or her own personal and professional knowledge as the mentor learns from the mentee. By providing guidance, support, advice, strategic feedback and other insights to a mentee, the mentor can learn and enhance his or her own leadership skills. Mentees often bring a fresh perspective to a difficult research problem and serving as a mentor can provide a renewed sense of purpose in meeting the challenges of leading a research program. While working with a mentee, the mentor also has the opportunity to gain a new talented colleague--one with whom the mentor may collaborate for years to come! Most of all, a mentor is provided with an important sense of satisfaction in contributing to a legacy of developing the next generation of creative research investigators.

What model of mentoring should I use?

As the question above indicates, mentees can opt for differing models of mentoring. In the complex world of today's academic health center, a mentee may need more than one mentor. Often a mentee will need to assemble an array of diverse individuals, each of whom can provide specialized guidance in a given area, to serve as mentors. While one mentor may be enough--mentees should consider developing a "personal mosaic of mentors" in order to gain a broad range of professional support from both internal and external professionals. Whether working together as a group to create synergy among diverse investigators or having a more traditional one-on-one mentoring relationship, it is important to recognize that there are diverse array of mentoring options. It will be important to consider these mentoring options and choose the best fit to meet your mentoring needs. One or more of these models may be most appropriate for you.

  • One-on-one mentoring
  • Team mentoring
  • Multiple mentors
  • Peer mentoring
  • Distance mentoring

Click here to read in-depth descriptions of these models.