I (Victoria) had my first full-time role after completing my PhD. World history combines education and management. Suddenly, I had to oversee the curriculum, manage instructors, and teach several classes. Although I had taught a few times during my PhD, I found myself wishing I had received formal training in these areas. Later, when I moved into a role supporting postdocs and graduate students, I heard experiences that mirrored my own. Inadequate preparation for teaching and leadership responsibilities.
It wasn’t until I started mentoring others that I realized I was drawing on my experience as a mentor and mentee to navigate these new areas of expertise. Some of the experiences I draw on include success stories from mentoring struggling undergraduate students, for example. Others represented failures, such as experiences of not feeling supported at all by a mentor or avoiding difficult conversations that could have helped one’s own mentee.
Similarly, when I (Jovana) entered an administrative role working with students, faculty, and administrators, I needed skills beyond those taught, discussed, and modeled in my doctoral program. in educational programs. At least that’s what I thought at first. But the more I worked to prepare for the requirements of my job, the more I realized that I was already learning from my mentors how to coach, guide, collaborate, and push back when necessary. By watching the graduate school dean advocate for me and other students, I learned how to do the same for my own students. My academic advisor’s diplomatic approach to working with my dissertation committee served as a model for me on how to navigate conversations with various stakeholders. And finally, having my boss ask me to overwork has taught me to push myself out of my comfort zone and have the necessary conversations about boundaries.
In your own educational experience, you may or may not have the opportunity to engage with resources in areas such as teaching, management, and leadership that may be important to your next career step. However, you likely have a mentor, either informally (from helping fellow students develop skills to welcoming new students to the program) or formally (as a teaching assistant, peer mentor, or other capacity). You may have served as a mentor to others.
In our role supporting the professional development of graduate students and postdocs, we find that these people learn many things from mentorship, including:
How to clarify your values, how to align expectations with others who have different priorities than you, and the importance of belonging to yourself and the people you work with.
In my last essay, I shared advice on how to translate your educational experience into skills like project management and problem solving. These skills can lead to a variety of potential roles within and outside of academia. Here, we provide strategies on how to continue in the same vein and identify and translate the skills developed through mentorship to pursue roles that emphasize teaching, management, and/or leadership.
communication
As a mentor or mentee, you may have presented your ideas and achievements to your mentor or acted as an audience member for your mentee. Effective communication with various constituencies is an essential part of education, leadership, and management. Therefore, you can use your experience communicating in mentoring relationships to show how you can engage with people with different skill levels, different amounts of experience, and different priorities.
I (Victoria) used my experience as a mentee to develop a communication approach. I’ve found that my mentoring meetings are much more effective if I identify my goals for the meeting and document the agenda and summary after the meeting. Otherwise, the meeting felt like a meander. I took this insight into my staff management (for example, encouraging supervisors to create meeting agendas and sharing tasks to document next steps).
A further aspect of mentorship communication is giving and receiving feedback. Good mentors ensure that their mentees receive regular feedback to help them reflect on their work and learning, and they seek the mentee’s feedback on the mentor’s support and the work itself. Applying this to the way you manage others may mean simply adjusting to new situations, clarifying how to regularly exchange feedback to build trust. .
When it comes to teaching, you can reflect your mentoring approach by asking for feedback throughout the semester or at key checkpoints during the semester and making adjustments in real time, rather than waiting until end-of-semester assessments. Additionally, a comprehensive teaching approach encourages students to provide regular feedback on their learning. Experience in teaching others and providing feedback on their performance will help you provide transparent feedback about students’ strengths and areas for growth.
If your next career step is to move outside of academia, you can apply the same principles to the people you supervise. I (Jovana) make sure to meet individually with the people I supervise to discuss the work, their overall well-being, workload, and work-life balance. Since power relationships inevitably exist, I also encourage my supervisors to check in with the people they supervise from time to time and ask them how they are doing and how they are feeling about their work and working with me. I am requesting it.
Promoting independence, self-efficacy, and a sense of belonging
An important part of the mentoring relationship is promoting independence and self-efficacy in the mentee. Reflecting on how you scaffold your mentees’ growth to support them in working on their own projects can help you imagine leading a course, team, or unit. You can clarify how you will scaffold learning in your classroom, for example, by breaking down your final project into assignments to be submitted throughout the semester. As a manager or leader of a large project, you can consider how to invite your colleagues to identify strategies and steps to complete each aspect of the project effectively, independently, and confidently.
In a mentoring relationship, the mentor also serves as an important resource for the mentee’s sense of belonging. These are the main reference points for mentees to understand their situation and their role within it. Mentors strive to understand their mentee’s role expectations and professional and personal goals as part of helping them achieve their next career step. Mentors highly welcome the mentee’s lived learning experience and are able to provide perspective on their goals, the achievability of those goals, and what the mentee needs to do to progress in the right direction. can. Whether you’ve experienced this as a mentor or a mentee, use that experience to develop an approach to help someone feel included and succeed. It may be possible. Similarly, you can translate this into ways to create learning or professional spaces where everyone can thrive.
power of reflection
The reflections we encourage throughout this essay include consideration of mediocre or negative mentoring relationships. These will also help you clarify what kind of teacher or leader you want to be. For example, when I (Jovana) was in teaching, we had a director who controlled everything and everyone to the hilt. Overall, it was a negative experience, but I learned what kind of bosses and mentors I don’t want to have, and what kind of bosses and mentors I don’t want to be around again.
On the other hand, my boss when I was a graduate assistant (and then my boss until I left in April of this year) and my PhD were very important to me. Both advisors were the embodiment of a role model mentor. I learned from them what it means to encourage and inspire those you work with through your own work ethic, clearly expressed values, and commitment to taking responsibility for yourself.
Our two essays invite you to reflect on your experiences as a graduate student or postdoc and consider how you can use them to envision yourself in your next role. In the often high-pressure, high-expectations, and stressful schedules of academia, we are intentional about how much we are learning beyond the specific expertise and content knowledge formally emphasized in graduate school. We don’t always take time to integrate and ruminate. Postdoctoral training.
However, in order to effectively navigate higher education, units, and mentoring relationships, you have developed skills that will make you a great teacher, manager, and leader in the future. Here we have considered how your mentoring experience can be reflected or translated into these areas and used accordingly as you prepare to apply for or start your next role.
Victoria Hallinan (she/her) is the Director of Professional Development Programs in the Office of Postdoctoral Research at Yale University and co-leader of SPHERE, a community of practice aimed at supporting non-biomedical postdocs through the sharing and creation of resources and programming. is. .
Jovana Milosavljevic Ardeljan (she/her) is the Director of Career, Professional, and Community Development at the University of New Hampshire Graduate School, where she conducts research, develops programs, and teaches professional development and communication skills to graduate students and postdocs. . Path to career diversification.
They are both members of the National Postdoctoral Association and the Graduate Career Consortium. The Graduate Careers Consortium is an organization that provides an international voice for graduate-level career and professional development leaders.
