Mentoring for Success in Physiology

Christin Carter-Su, the 2005 Bodil M. Schmidt-Nielsen Distinguished Mentor and Scientist Awardee, with Linda Samuelson from the University of Michigan, the colleague who nominated Carter-Su.

I am deeply honored to be a recipient of the Bodil Schmidt-Nielsen Distinguished Mentor and Scientist Award, an award named for such an outstanding physiologist and role model. Just last summer my husband and I brought our children to experience one of my favorite places, Acadia National Park on Mt. Desert Island off the coast of Maine. As we were hiking with one of my favorite mentors, Dr. David Dawson, presently Chair of the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology at Oregon Health and Science University, Dave was telling me what a wonderful woman Dr. Schmidt-Nielsen was and how we would have liked each other. I found this to be the ultimate compliment. Dr. Schmidt-Nielsen is the embodiment of my first rule of mentoring:
Mentor Rule 1. When serving as a mentor, it is not just the advice you give that is helpful. The example you set is equally important (see Table 1).

Table 1. Mentoring rules for the mentor.

When serving as a mentor, it is not just the advice you give that is helpful. The example you set is equally important.

Your mentoring can have a tremendous impact on someone else’s life.

Share your passion for your job with your students and fellows.
Your passion is probably more inspiring than any advice you give.

Share your life story: your past, current life and future goals.

Science should be fun.

Keep a sense of humor.

There are times when it is okay to ask your mentee to just “trust me.”

Share your knowledge.

Listen carefully.

Be proactive.

Be honest.

Be diplomatic.

Show you care.

Help make connections.

Be an advocate.

I spent a great deal of time trying to decide what to talk about today. I started by rereading some of my favorite mentoring books. However, I eventually came to the conclusion that there are a lot of people who are more qualified than I am to give a lecture on mentoring and that there are lots of good books and articles available on the topic. So I asked myself what unique perspective I could offer. I decided the only unique perspective I could offer was one based upon my own life and my own experiences. So what I plan to do is to tell you a little bit about my background, mention some of my more influential mentors, and tell you the lessons I learned from them (either directly or indirectly). I will then finish up with a few general thoughts about mentoring.

To give you some of my background: I grew up in a University town (Newark, DE). And yet there were only three or four girls in my high school class of over 300 who took calculus and only two or three who took physics. Despite my being one of the top students in my calculus class, the only math related profession my male calculus teacher suggested I should consider was teaching high school math. My well-meaning female guidance counselor suggested I not carry such a difficult course load and consider nursing school. However, I had terrific chemistry and physics teachers, both men, who were very supportive of my interests and skills in math and science. My physics teacher offered me a chance to do some research with him. My chemistry teacher made certain I received the most lucrative mathematics and science award at graduation. Their support, the support of some of my non-science female teachers, and the support of my parents were apparently sufficient to make me think I could succeed as a scientist because I never wavered in my desire to go to a rigorous school and become a scientist.

From this high school experience, I learned three important lessons related to mentoring (see Table 2):

Mentee Rule 1: A well intentioned mentor is not the same as a good mentor.

Mentee Rule 2: Not all advice is good advice.

Mentee Rule 3: Use common sense when assessing advice.

This trend of having classes with very few females, few if any female math or science professors, but supportive male mentors, continued throughout my education. My first real mentor was Dr. Ettore Infante, Associate Professor of Applied Mathematics at Brown University, who later became Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Vanderbilt University and is now retired. Dr. Infante took me under his wing during freshman week of college, mapped out a potential program, advised me on classes throughout college, introduced me to another faculty member who shared my interest in combining mathematics with biology, helped me get a National Science Foundation Undergraduate Research Fellowship, and helped get my individualized major officially adopted as a bonafide University major shortly before I graduated. I graduated as the first person from Brown University with a major in Applied Mathematics-Biomedical Sciences, with a program very similar to the one we mapped out together during that first week of college. This leads me to the next rule of mentoring.
Mentee Rule 4. If you find someone helpful, adopt him or her as a mentor.
I, of course, had an officially assigned advisor, but I never used him. He was nice but did not know enough about me or my interests to be helpful. This leads me to the corollary of my previous rule of mentoring:

Mentee Rule 5. If someone is not helpful, then look elsewhere.

This is true for advisors, true for teaching assistants in courses, and true for mentors. I also learned the impact mentoring can have. So for the mentors in the audience, what you are doing is worthwhile.

Mentor Rule 2. Your mentoring can have a tremendous impact on someone else’s life.

My second real mentor was Dr. H. Thomas Banks, then Assistant Professor of Applied Mathematics, who is currently Director of the Center for Research in Scientific Computation at North Carolina State University. He was the person to whom Dr. Infante recommended me for an undergraduate research project combining biology with mathematics. Tom was a terrific mentor who treated me as an equal and taught me many things that I continue to share with my students and fellows:

Mentee Rule 6. Find a passion and go for it. When you do research, most of the time things do not work which leads me to Mentee Rule 7. Make certain that the high you get during the 5% of the time that your research “works” is so high that it can carry you through the other 95% of the time when things do not work.

Mentee Rule 8. You can never predict the job market. So do not pick a profession just so you can get a job at the end of your training. Pick something that you love to do. That way, whether or not there are jobs in your major at the time you graduate, you will have at least loved what you have done for the past years you spent doing it.

Mentee Rule 9. Never take a seminal job in California. Do not do a postdoctoral fellowship or take a new faculty job in California. There are too many distractions at a critical stage of your life!

I also learned that as a mentor, you should share your passion for your job with your students and fellows. Your passion is probably more inspiring than any advice you give (Mentor Rule 3).

Mentor Rule 4. Share your life story: your past, current life and future goals. Let your mentee know of difficult decisions you had to make, obstacles you had to overcome, and insecurities you had at the start of your career, and may still have. Share your current life and share some of your future goals. This lets your mentee know that they do not have to be perfect and things do not have to always go smoothly for them to succeed in science.

Graduate school followed the same pattern as high school and college. I joined the Radiation Biology and Biophysics Department at the University of Rochester—you can imagine what the ratio of men to women was in that department back in 1972! I think the numbers in my entering class were three women and around 24 men. Again, most, if not all, of my classes were taught by men. However, I had a great thesis advisor. Dr. George Kimmich introduced me to Na+-dependent glucose and amino acid transport and thus to physiology. He just retired this past year and I had dinner with him and his wife this past week during my daughter’s grand college visit tour.

Again, I learned many mentoring lessons from George:

Mentee Rule 10. Science should be fun. We all entered the field of science presumably because we love it. It is easy to lose sight of that fact under the pressures to succeed in the world of science. But science can and should still be fun. If it stops being fun for you, consider changing labs, projects, or even your career. It is not that difficult to find another “not fun” career that is less stressful and pays more.

And for mentors, it is much easier for your mentees to remember that science should be fun if you remember that Science should be fun (Mentor Rule 5).

Mentee Rule 11. Keep a sense of humor. It is always good not to take yourself too seriously, and to keep a sense of humor about failed experiments and negative things that happen to you or your colleagues. In my laboratory, we used to have a display of cracked and otherwise failed electrophoretic gels. The more artistic the resulting design, the more highly the gel was valued. This rule to Keep a sense of humor (Mentor Rule 6) also applies to mentors.

Mentee Rule 12. Stay true to yourself. You can be a wonderfully decent, kind and caring person and still succeed in science. As I tell my students, the very rich and famous rarely achieve fortune and fame by being warm and fuzzy towards their students, fellows and colleagues. Unfortunately, we all know “highly successful” scientists who exhibit an extreme level of self-centeredness and behavior that to some of us borders on the unethical. But that does not mean that you have to lower yourself to their level. There are many terrific scientists who are also terrific people. George helped teach me that you can be a wonderfully decent, kind and caring person and still succeed in science.

Mentee Rule 13. When writing a manuscript, tell a good story. There is no need to have chronologic accuracy. I can still remember the amazement I had when I read one particular manuscript George wrote. I remembered in what order the experiments were carried out and the thought processes that went into their design, and they bore no resemblance to how George presented them in the manuscript! But the manuscript told a wonderful, easy to follow, very logical story, things that are much more important than chronological accuracy.

Mentee Rule 14. “Trust me.” There are times when you have to just trust your advisor. The corollary to this is Rule 7 for mentors which states that there are also times when it is okay to ask your mentee to just “trust me”. After all, you are the mentor and presumably bring to the relationship many years of accumulated knowledge and experience. In my case, the occasion arose when I needed to change my thesis project in my fourth year of graduate school and George and I could not agree on what to change it to. Eventually, George played the trump card: “Just trust me. You will come to love this project”—and he was right.

Mentee Rule 15. Keep in touch with your mentors even after you leave their institution and keep them informed of your accomplishments. Your mentors most likely invested quite a bit of themselves in you and usually enjoy hearing how you are doing. It can also be very useful for you as well. I got two of my first faculty offers because of George. A past graduate student of mine got her two jobs in part because of people I knew. Past mentors can also be in a position to recommend you for study sections, editorial boards and so forth.

My postdoctoral mentor, Dr. Michael Czech, currently Professor and Chair, Program in Molecular Medicine, University of Massachusetts Medical School, taught me an enormous amount, particularly about scientific politics. And do not kid yourself – politics is as important in this job as in any other. Things that I learned from Mike include the following:

Mentee Rule 16. Understand the politics of your department. Understand the politics of your University. Understand the politics of your field. Understand the politics of your Professional Society.

Mentee Rule 17. Sell your research. Make your presentations and grant applications interesting and exciting. The first time I heard Mike present some of my research at a national meeting, it sounded so good that it took me awhile to figure out it was actually my data that he was talking about.

I learned to think outside the box (Mentee Rule 18) and never hesitate to apply new techniques to my work. Never become married to any one technique. Go where the science leads you (Mentee Rule 19). Arguably my laboratory’s greatest contribution to science thus far is showing that growth hormone binding to its membrane receptor activates the receptor-associated tyrosine kinase JAK2. The concept that growth hormone and other ligands that bind to cytokine receptors might function by activating a receptor tyrosine kinase or receptor associated tyrosine kinase was such a novel, unpopular concept that people either ignored our work or panned it for almost seven years. Our data went against current dogma. However, we kept following the science and it turned out that we were right and the pay-off has been enormous.

I learned that you have to schmooze (Mentee Rule 20), whether you enjoy schmoozing or not. People need to know your work. People are more likely to fund you and give you the benefit of the doubt, recommend you for committees and study sections, and write a positive job recommendation or promotion letter if they can put a face to a name, and if they like you and respect your work. You need to let people know you are a player. You have to talk to people on the phone. You need to attend national and international meetings and ask questions to let people know who you are. You need to join other scientists for meals and other activities, no matter how much it costs or how tired you are, or how much you would rather be doing something else. I have made some of my best connections by inviting people to dinner and/or persuading others to join me site-seeing. If you are a postdoctoral fellow or a new faculty member and are intimidated by the senior people in the field, then start practicing schmoozing with people at your stage of career. After all, they will eventually grow up to be the important senior people in the field.

I learned that to become an equal in the eyes of the scientific world, you have to act like an accomplished scientist (Mentee Rule 21), equal to the most important people in your field. You have to dress the part of an accomplished scientist if you want to be taken seriously. You want your colleagues to think of you as a colleague, not as a student. You have to carry yourself as if you are an accomplished scientist. You need to talk to other scientists as if they are interested in what you have to say. For me, the hurdles included such things as becoming comfortable calling faculty by their first names, taking the initiative to talk to famous people about their science, and not letting the fact that my senior colleagues had total control over my life and future make me feel inferior or subservient.

I learned that the way to make a lab successful is to hire well and bring out the best in the people you hire (Mentee Rule 22). When you are a student, you most likely are doing all or most of the experiments yourself. But when you become head of a laboratory, you will no longer have the time to do the experiments yourself. You will have to hire people to do them for you. Thus, your success or failure will depend substantially on your ability to supervise and motivate your students, fellows and employees.

I learned to accentuate the positive (Mentee Rule 23). As the leader of your laboratory, you need to find the positive in every experiment. I take pride in hearing that when people in my lab get discouraging results, others in the lab tell them to come see me because I will find something good about their experiment. Mike also taught me to think twice about answering the question “How’s it going?” truthfully. When I first started my own laboratory, things were going much slower than I would have liked. It was very discouraging. It was particularly discouraging because whenever I asked Mike about how things were going in his laboratory, he would always say it was going terrifically. So I figured he was doing great and I was doing terribly. It was very depressing. However, I eventually talked to people in his laboratory and they had all kinds of horror stories. So I learned from that that if you want the world to think of you as a successful scientist, it is much better to dwell on all the positive things going on and keep the problems to yourself and your best friend, or maybe a very trusted mentor. Along the same lines, my first grant proposal came back with quite a few criticisms. These criticisms sounded very familiar to me. I quickly figured out that they sounded very familiar because they were exactly the same criticisms that I had put into my grant proposal (you know the part—what potential problems might arise). Never again did I provide my reviewers with the exact sentences they needed to criticize my grant proposal. I now write all my potential problems in subordinate clauses, saving the dominant clauses for why the potential problem is not really a problem. My priority scores have gone way up. At the very least, the reviewers are forced to find their own criticisms of my grant, or if they choose to cite one of the problems I brought up, at least I have supplied the exact words for another member of the study section to argue why that particular problem is not really a problem.

Although I received a great deal of mentoring during my years of training, I had not really thought of it as mentoring at the time. It was really as a faculty member that mentoring became a big part of my life. This is when I learned that having women colleagues was vital to my success and sanity. This is when I figured out that I needed a lot of help to be able to succeed as an academician: setting up my lab, getting grants, putting together and supervising a research team and getting tenure. I needed help with all those forms, committee decisions, teaching, grant writing, time management, etc etc. Luckily, the University of Michigan was a very supportive institution with lots of people willing to help. This is when I learned Mentee Rule 24 that:

One can never have too many mentors. Not everyone is good at everything. Individuals are unlikely to have all of the knowledge you need. You need a mentor who understands the politics of specific committees, your department and your institution. You need a mentor who understands your science. You need a mentor who is good at teaching, if that is one of your responsibilities. You need a mentor who is active in your professional society. You need a mentor who has a similar living situation and viewpoint: for instance, women need a woman mentor, men and women with children need mentors who have families, and minorities need minority mentors. You need someone for reality testing. You need someone who can help you see all the issues relevant to the problem at hand (for these and other examples, see Table 3).
Let me give you some examples: I can help a woman colleague help decipher whether a comment from a colleague is sexist or not. I am less able to determine whether a subtle comment is racist. You need someone who will take your grant and tear it to shreds. But you also need someone who can tell you how to fix it. This goes for the science as well as the writing. You need someone who will share his/her animal use, radioactivity, human use, chemical safety forms with you. You need someone to help you solve personnel problems. You need someone to help you determine which committees to serve on, how to choose the people to recommend for your tenure letters, what you can say “no” to and how to tell your chair “no” when he or she wants you to take on some time-consuming or controversial job. You need someone to help you figure out how to deal with a colleague who you think is undermining you, stealing your ideas, and/or not citing your work. You need someone to help you figure out how to get invited to give seminars, and be appointed to editorial boards and grant review committees.

Among my many mentors in the Department of Molecular and Integrative Physiology at the University of Michigan, several stand out. Dr. Jack Kostyo was the chair who hired me. From Jack I learned that it was okay to say “no.” Dr. Arthur Vander helped me with my teaching. Dr. David Dawson helped me deal with sticky situations with colleagues. My current chair, Dr. John Williams, has been most generous in helping me understand Medical School politics and skills needed to be an administrator. Dr. Jessica Schwartz tears apart my grants and papers and makes suggestions on how to make them better, helps with letter writing, and serves as a general sounding board. I have had many other mentors both inside and outside my department, including a number of terrific women, who have greatly contributed to my success as an academician and made my life so much better at Michigan. Among these, I would like to mention one person in particular who has been a strong mentor in my life, Dr. Anita Payne, currently Professor Emeritus, and share with you just a few of the important things she taught me about mentoring.

Mentee Rule 25. Choose your committees and battles carefully. Not all committees are worth serving on and not all battles are worth fighting.

Mentee Rule 26. Never say “yes” to anything when first asked. Always take time to think about the request and preferably run it by someone more experienced. Is this a good committee or editorial board to be on? Will it help your career or will it prevent you from saying “yes” to something more important down the road? Will it take away too much time from doing those things that will help you get tenure? If you decide to say “no”, figure out a graceful way to turn that particular request down.

Mentee Rule 27. Your sanity counts for something. Most likely, and particularly if you are perceived as being good and conscientious, you will not be able to do everything you are asked to do. You probably cannot even do all of those things you would like to do or feel you need to do, particularly if you have children. There will be times when it is okay to turn something down because to say “yes” to the request would put an unbearable strain on your time and threaten your physical or mental health or that of your family. It will probably not be the only time you are asked. If you really want to serve on that committee or what have you, you will probably have another opportunity to do so in the future when things are less hectic - perhaps after your children have grown, you have acquired a good lab manager to help run your laboratory, or you have completed your time as course director.

Being a successful woman with a husband and two children, I probably get asked most for advice about balancing work and family. This is the advice I give women (see Table 4), but most of it applies to men as well as women:

Family gives women happiness; Work gives women self-esteem. For this reason, it is important to keep a balance in your life. You should not feel guilty for working and you should not feel guilty for having a family and wanting to spend some quality time with them. But there are ways that you can make your life easier.

Choose your mate carefully. It is difficult and time-consuming to work full-time and have a family. It is virtually impossible if you are expected to work full-time and handle all the traditional female roles of wife, house-keeper, care-giver and cook. It is best to find a mate who values your job equally with his/hers and will share willingly and equally in household responsibilities.

Get lots of outside household help. If both you and your spouse are working, you need to think of it as 1 and 1/2 incomes, not as two. You need to plan on spending at least 1/2 of an income on help. Hire someone to clean your house for you. Hire the best daycare provider possible, preferably someone who will come to your house and will also do the laundry and other household chores. Hire someone to mow the grass. In essence, hire someone to do those jobs that you do not like doing so that you will have time to do the things that you do want or need to do, such as spend quality time with your children and spouse or write up another paper for publication.

Build a strong support network. If like me, you do not have family in the area who can help when emergencies arise, you need to build a strong support network. When my children were young, my husband would ask every teenage girl he saw in our neighborhood whether she babysat. We made arrangements ahead of time with other friends and neighbors who had childcare to cross cover for each other if our childcare fell through. We paid for our children to attend before and after-school programs even when we had after-school childcare at home just so we could send our kids to those programs on those days we did need it, such as when I had to give an 8 am lecture, the childcare giver called in sick, or the teachers were having one of their many in-service training or reporting days. We got the phone numbers of our friends’ current and former caregivers, graduate and undergraduate students who were willing to baby-sit in a pinch, preschool student helpers, anyone who might be able to take care of our children on snow days, when our children were sick, or when our caregiver was unable to come for whatever reason.

Form friendships with other working families. And as a corollary, try not to live in a neighborhood or send your child to a preschool where all the other families have a stay-at-home parent. Our daughters went to a preschool where a requirement was that both parents had to have at least a half time job. Until they were five and went to public kindergarten, our children did not realize there was such a thing as a stay-at-home mom. Our children’s preschool did not ask you to contribute food and help serve a Thanksgiving dinner—they prepared it and served it to you! Other working families can provide valuable information and emotional support. This is true for both men and women. It was one of my husband’s male colleagues who helped persuade us of the benefits of having at-home care for our newborn. Other working families can tell you how and where to find good help, the best preschools and summer camps for working families, how to cope with having one spouse out of town, where to buy the best “home-cooked” food to bring to school events, which sports teams have the best coaches and more importantly, the most convenient practice times, locations and car pools.

Forget about domestic perfection. There are times in your life when it is impractical to have the perfect house, the kind of house many of us grew up in. You need to make priorities. My husband’s and my priorities are to spend time with our children and each other rather than to spend time straightening the house, cooking gourmet meals or having a Sunset magazine garden. For quite a few years, we entertained at home only those friends we knew well enough to have over without straightening up the house.

Delegate. Learn how to delegate. This goes for the home as well as work. There was one year when it became obvious that I was not going to be able to get my grant application out doing it primarily by myself as I had usually done or even by getting help from just those people in my laboratory whose work was funded by that grant. In desperation, I announced to the laboratory that I needed everyone to stop working on his/her experiments and help with the grant. I had people looking up techniques, proof reading, shortening the text, checking references, working on figures, and buying food for everyone working on the grant. What was enlightening to me was finding out afterwards that no one really minded helping, despite some very long days and nights. Some in fact told me they really enjoyed it because it made them feel an important and integral part of the laboratory. They learned a lot about the science going on in the entire laboratory, and about what it takes to put together a grant application. I have never looked back!

My final advice for mentees includes the following:

Mentee Rule 28. Everyone has something to offer. I find every one of my colleagues has something useful to teach me. And in every case where I have reached out for help, they have freely offered their advice. Asking for advice is also a great way to get to know your colleagues better and vice-versa.

Mentee Rule 29. Choose your primary mentors carefully. Some people make better mentors than others. When you are new to a situation, there is some utility in keeping a low profile for a while and watching carefully how others interact with you and with each other. Pay attention to whose comments seem most insightful and whose comments others pay the most attention to. Pick that person as a mentor.

Mentee Rule 30. Seek out help. There are many things you will need help with during your career. Be proactive and seek out the help you need. Do not wait for your mentor to come to you. Your mentor may be happy to help, but may not realize that you need help or may be busy with other things and just not think about coming to you. As I tell people who seek me out, the squeaky wheel definitely gets the grease. And I suspect that this is true for many mentors.

Mentee Rule 31. Do not wait until the last minute to ask for help. I cannot do a very good job helping you if you wait until the last minute. I also resent it, particularly if it is a recurring theme.

Mentee Rule 32. Nurture relationships.

Mentee Rule 33. Do not take your mentor’s advice personally or get defensive. The greatest gift a mentor can give you is the truth. It is not valuable to have someone read your grant cursorily and say, “It’s great”. You need someone who will spend the time to go over it and point out the rough spots both scientifically and communication wise. I have a couple of people who do that for me. I have to admit that I am not always a happy camper when I first get back the comments – how could they not understand what I wrote? They must have been tired when they read it! But after I calm down, I realize that if someone had a problem with a particular part of my grant proposal, even if I do not agree with his/her suggested revisions, that part needs rethinking and rewriting. If your friend has trouble understanding your paper or proposal, just think about the reviewer of the paper or proposal who is not your friend, may not be directly in your area of research, is probably reading the paper or proposal late at night after a hard day’s work, and has no vested interest in taking the time to understand your work or figure out its importance.

Mentee Rule 34. Be discrete. Mentoring works best when the mentor can share his/her personal thoughts and experiences about situations and other people. Never, ever, breach that trust. If you do, you will never receive honest advice again.

Mentee Rule 35. Do not undermine your mentor. Again, this is an issue of trust. Do not put down your mentor to anyone privately or publicly. Similar-ly, when your mentor recommends you for some task, for example, a committee of your professional society, do your best job at that task. Your mentor put his/her reputation on the line for you and it is up to you to prove that his/her trust is warranted. Besides, doing a good job will open the door to other more powerful jobs.

Mentee Rule 36. Return the favor - help your mentor whenever appropriate and mentor others. Generally, mentors mentor out of the goodness of their hearts—to help you succeed in a challenging job. There are three good ways to repay them. The first and foremost is to follow their advice and succeed. But there are two other ways to return the favor. Support your mentor’s career in some tangible way, such as recommending them for an appropriate award. Equally important, pass on the legacy and mentor others.
Final advice for mentors:

Mentor Rule 8. Share your knowledge: You have more knowledge about science and the scientific life than you know. Put yourself in the other person’s shoes. Remember what things you found difficult or even scary. What things did people do for you that were helpful? What things would it have been nice to have someone help you with? For me, one of my most traumatic experiences as a new faculty member was my first lecture to a large dental school class. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong, including handouts delaying the start of class because I had no concept of the time needed to copy 300 20-page handouts or that 300 20-page handouts were too heavy to hand carry; not knowing how to use the microphone and having no one there to help; not knowing how to hold and use my lecture notes, slide changer, chalk, and pointer all at the same time—you get the picture. Because of this, I made a point of sharing my experience with all subsequent new faculty teaching in the course and personally took them to the lecture hall ahead of time to make certain they knew how to use all of the equipment.

Mentor Rule 9. Listen carefully. Every mentee has different needs and comes to the relationship from different starting points. Your goal is to make certain that a particular mentee succeeds and that means that you need to tailor your advice to that particular mentee.

Mentor Rule 10. Be proactive. Oftentimes your mentee will not be aware of everything they need help with. Be proactive and mentor him/her on things before they ask. Do not wait until it is too late. For example, make certain they know from day one what is expected of them to get tenure in the department. Do not wait until the year they come up for tenure to tell them.
Mentor Rule 11. Be honest. Tell the truth as you see it, but be diplomatic (Mentor Rule 12). It is better for you to tell your mentee the truth about some weakness while there is still time for them to do something about it than it is to have your mentee find out their weakness the hard way, such as by their grant application not getting funded, their promotion getting turned down, or becoming unemployed because they turned down a pretty good job offer due to an unrealistic expectation of getting a better one.

Mentor Rule 13. Show you care. Science can be a daunting profession, especially at the graduate school level or higher. It is extremely helpful to mentees to know that at least one person in their chosen career is looking out for them and cares whether they succeed.
Mentor Rule 14. Help make connections. If possible and appropriate, recommend your mentee for things that will promote their career, such as powerful committees, awards, seminars, and so forth. Introduce them to powerful people in their field.

Mentor Rule 15. Be an advocate. View your job as helping your mentee look their very best. If possible, save your criticisms for the mentee. If it is not possible, try to put a positive spin on a negative comment. If you feel you cannot be an advocate, consider finding another mentor for your mentee.

In summary, the mentor-mentee relationship can be a very special one. It is a chance for the mentee to learn how to succeed in a very demanding field filled with overachievers. For the mentor, it is a chance to pass on years of accumulated knowledge about how to succeed and take pleasure in helping the younger generation. For women and minority mentors of women and minorities, respectively, mentoring can be a particularly effective way to increase the number of like minded colleagues, taking the pressure off of you to be the perceived representative of your sex or racial group. The keys to success are many. Overall, however, it is important for the mentee to keep asking for the help he or she needs and the mentor to keep anticipating and providing the help he or she would have liked to have had; for the mentee to use common sense in assessing the advice and the mentor in giving the advice, and for both of the mentee and mentor to always keep their eye on the long term goal of having the mentee succeed in science. I would like to close this talk with the following thought for both mentor and mentee to keep in mind as they pursue this challenging and often stressful career. This life we have chosen may be stressful, but it is never boring. What a gift we have been given to be paid, usually by the public, to pursue our passion and contribute to the world’s knowledge.