Mentorship Program: an ongoing initiative by the OHBM Student and Postdoc Special Interest Group

By AmanPreet Badhwar, Ayaka Ando, Natalia Bielczyk, Marzia Scelsi, Michele Veldsman

“In order to be a mentor, and an effective one, one must care. You must care. You don’t have to know how many square miles are in Idaho, you don’t need to know what is the chemical makeup of chemistry, or of blood or water. Know what you know and care about the person.” — Maya Angelou

The online mentorship program is an ongoing initiative launched by the OHBM Student and Postdoc Special Interest Group in early 2017. In this international initiative, mentors and mentees from around the globe are matched on the basis of their experience and expectations. The mentor supports the mentee’s growth by providing advice on topics such as - but not limited to - academic development, grant writing, and work-life balance. What is unique about this program is that every member of the OHBM community can be mentored and can also be a mentor. For example, the program has early career principle investigators (PIs) who seek mentoring by more established PIs, as well as senior PhD students who mentor trainees just starting out. As a rule of thumb, the program maintains at least 3 years of “experience difference” between mentors and mentees, with mentor-mentee pairs often being close in career stage. Currently, there are 424 participants in the program. In this blogpost, we compare statistics from two successive rounds (Round 1, 2017 and Round 2, 2018) of the mentorship program: 252 participants signed up in Round 1, and an additional 172 participants signed up in Round 2.

Figure 1: Geographic Distribution. (A) Distribution of all 424 participants in the program. (B) distribution of participants in Round 1, and (c) distribution of participants in Round 2. Gender distribution was similar for both rounds, with slightly fewer females enrolled in both rounds.

Figure 2: Gender distribution. female (red), male (green)

Relative to Round 1, geographical distribution of brain mappers joining the mentorship program in Round 2 remained largely unchanged, with two notable exceptions: gain in members from the Middle East, and drop in new members from South America.

Distribution of participants with respect to career stage was similar in both rounds, with PhD candidates being the most prevalent.

Figure 3: Career stage distribution

Round 2 observed a decrease in the fraction of mentees who declared an interest in starting a lab, relative to mentees who were either undecided, or planning to move to industry. This effect might be associated with constantly decreasing percentage of faculty jobs as opposed to PhD jobs, which is a strong trend in academia since the 80s.

In line with the above observation, Round 2 of the mentorship program saw a drop in the demand for advice related to starting a lab, and a small increase in the demand for advice related to transitioning into industry from mentees.

Figure 4: Long term goals

Looking at the summary statistic of all participants in rounds 1 and 2 coming from USA and Canada, Europe, Australia and Asia, an outlook on mentorship was found to be similar globally (Figure 6).

Figure 5: Advice sought by mentees

n both rounds, mentors declared similar areas of expertise, mostly related to building a research career. This included taking career opportunities, finding postdoc jobs, developing relationships with coworkers and  general advice on career development. Only a handful of mentors indicated expertise in coaching mentees on transitioning to industry.

Figure 6: Long term career goals and expertise sought around the globe

Figure 7: Advice sought by mentees

Figure 8: Expertise listed by mentors

In summary, participants were gender balanced, and while geographically they hailed from around the globe, the vast majority were from North America and Europe. Over 25% of participants in the programme were willing to take on a double role (i.e. both as a mentor and a mentee), thus indicating a willingness to give back to the OHBM community. While the program saw an increase in requests for mentoring on non-academic career options (e.g. transition to industry), this was not followed by an increase in mentoring capacity in these areas. We would thus like to reach out to mentors with experience in industry and entrepreneurship to join the mentoring initiative. Overall, the expectations and competencies declared by participants around the globe were similar, thereby indicating that an online mentorship platform is necessary and useful for the OHBM community.

Note: In addition to the online mentorship program, the OHBM Student and Postdoc Special Interest Group will be holding its second “Annual Mentoring and Career Development Symposium” at the annual OHBM meeting this year. Hope to see many mentors and mentees at the event on Tuesday, June 19th!