What suggestions do you have for finding and choosing a mentor?
There is no one way to find and choose a mentor, because a successful career is guided by multiple mentors. No one person can provide all the advice and support one needs, in all the domains that comprise a career. And the type of advice and support one needs changes over the course of a career. To find good guides, pay attention to how they navigate the world. Preserve the core of what they do and how they do it and adapt the rest to your own style.
What is the best advice that you received as a graduate student?
The best advice I received as a graduate student was from my advisor, Dr. Cecilia Shore (now retired). Cecilia was fond of quipping that “if you can’t fix it, feature it.” In other words, if something is not working, do not just look for the silver lining, but actually turn the thing inside out so that the silver lining is what shows, and then capitalize on it. You will be surprised how often it works.
What is the best advice that you often give to your students/mentees?
Everything is a work in progress. Just because something did not work right away—on the first draft, for example—does not mean that what you have done so far is “wrong,” or that you need to start over. Think of Michelangelo and his beautiful statue of David. After his first day of work on the marble, Michelangelo did not step back, look, and say to himself that what he did today was wrong. No—it was merely incomplete—the statue was a work in progress. Work on it every day and watch it take shape.
What are the most rewarding and most difficult aspects of being a mentor?
The most rewarding aspect is watching students find their own way in the field, regardless of their direction. The most difficult aspect is almost the same thing—watching students make their own way, even when they choose differently than you would for yourself, or even for them.
What advice would you give to graduate students who want to have careers in academia?
Go for it! It is the most rewarding career I can imagine. More concretely, develop both a “cheap” and an “expensive” line of research. The cheap line involves pursuit of smaller questions, with tried-and-true methods, and at least one outcome that you can count on to “work” (i.e., to yield publishable results). The expensive line involves pursuit of larger or riskier questions, with methods that might be high risk but also stand to be high pay off, and which may yield nothing that “works,” but which is likely to have high heuristic value.
What advice would you give to early career scholars?
Develop a thick skin and celebrate small victories. There is the adage that the only difference between people who are successful in the world of funding for research and those who are not is that those who are successful submit more applications. But of course, submitting applications—or papers—makes you vulnerable to rejection. My favorite rejection letter was one I received very early in my career. It read “We received many fine applications. Yours was not among them.” I have never forgotten it, but I also did not let it stop me. And every time I have even a small success, I celebrate it!
What lessons have you learned as a mentor?
That every student or colleague has their own life to live. I cannot make choices for them. What I can do is be there and share when they have something to celebrate and help them regain perspective when things go less well.
How has being a mentor/teacher influenced your research?
My image is of myself at the hub of a large wheel. My students and collaborators extend out from there, taking us in new directions. Yet in each one, you can see the connection to the hub. I sometimes think of us as “locally stupid units” (a phrase borrowed from distributed processing models)—the knowledge or ideas are not in the individual. Rather, they are patterns that emerge from joint action. I can never quite anticipate where a collaboration with a student will go. But 99 times out of 100, they have built a strong new spoke on the wheel.”