Early Career Scientists Need Mentorship, Too

In their latest update, the SPSP Early Career Committee discusses the needs of early career members, providing advice on building stronger, more effective mentoring networks, as well as sharing ideas for a potential mentorship program.

Career transitions with unique needs

Early career scientists have unique needs and experience unique challenges related to mentoring compared to those still in PhD programs or more advanced in their careers. We are going through an important transitional period in our professional lives, which is both exciting and daunting in that transitions are typically accompanied by uncertainty about the future and concerns over job security and precarity. However, despite these unique needs and circumstances, most of the published literature on mentoring in academia focuses on undergraduate and graduate students (and rightfully so!), but it’s not like mentoring needs disappear once someone earns the title of “doctor.” Other fields, like medicine, have a stronger tradition of mentoring junior scientists (perhaps because mentorship history is explicitly considered in some funding applications; Keller et al., 2014). There are also regional and cultural differences in what is expected of early career scientists. For example, in the United States, early-career scientists are often expected to demonstrate “independence” by no longer publishing or working with their former advisors, which means their main source of mentorship that they’ve spent years developing suddenly drops away. By contrast, in the United Kingdom, shorter PhDs followed by postdoctoral fellowships–sometimes with little to no teaching exposure–mean that early career scientists have less time to gain mentorship on all aspects of their future careers, and have less time to solidify those bonds. Generally, this means that as early career scientists establish their own career paths, they are also expected to serve as mentors to undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral scholars under their guidance, but they have little to no continuing mentorship for themselves. 

Quick tips for mentoring

Building stronger, more effective mentoring networks is not something any of us can achieve overnight. However, there are steps we can take as early career scientists to both improve our own mentorship of those under our care, as well as facilitate more effective mentoring opportunities for ourselves. 

Most of us will need to support students (undergraduate and graduate level) and junior scholars below us as part of our commitment to service, research and teaching, and departmental culture. Being a good mentor can mean different things to different people. However, excellent mentors are often described in terms such as “accessible” and “available", “reliable” and “responsive,” “connected” and “experienced,” and aware of their own strengths and weaknesses (Berkeley). Indeed, research suggests that the five benchmarks of productive mentoring are personal connection, shared values, mutual respect, clear expectations, and reciprocity (Straus & Sackett, 2013). 

You can take steps to ensure that your mentees see you as someone they can easily approach with their needs by clearly signposting when and how they can get in touch. For example, are you someone who is more likely to respond quickly to an email or a dedicated SLACK channel? You should also recognize that you’re not in this alone. This means there is an opportunity to set up collaborative mentorship clusters within and across universities. Setting up group mentoring opportunities can also be a productive way to address gaps in your own knowledge and diversify the perspectives and approaches to offering support and mentorship. There are also lots of helpful guides that exist (e.g., this report from Berkley looking at the experiences of PhD students; these resource guides and activities from the London School of Economics on being an academic mentor).

You can also proactively try and enhance your own experiences with mentors. Start by establishing formal and informal personal connections with people you see as both reliable and knowledgeable across different aspects of your career. It might be the case that a role model who can support you in reaching your research goals is not the same person who models the teaching or service/admin goals that you want to achieve. Where more formal mentoring is desired, set clear expectations with your mentor about what you need, what you hope to achieve, and what you don’t know.

The SPSP Early Career Committee’s ideas for a mentorship program

The reality is that early career scientists need individualized guidance from experienced scientists familiar with their unique cultural, regional, and professional contexts. The SPSP Early Career Committee has been focused on developing a mentorship program for Early Career members specifically to help support these unique mentoring needs. Research (Keller et al., 2014) demonstrates mentors are more effective when they have clear expectations, protected time for mentoring, recognition and reward, and peer support. Mentees indicate it is challenging to find good mentors and to develop productive relationships with clear roles and responsibilities. Our program is designed to meet these needs as much as possible. 

Some evidence suggests that mentoring relationships are more impactful when early career mentees are paired with mid-career faculty who are able to give them specific advice (Iversen et al., 2014). Thus, pairing mentors and mentees based on shared interests, experiences, personal backgrounds, identities, and goals is ideal. Our program proposal does exactly that.

Our plan is to send out a mentorship survey to Early Career SPSP members. Those interested in mentorship will tell us their institution type and career track, as well as topics they’d like mentorship on and identities that are important to them. We will also solicit suggestions for SPSP mid-career candidates for mentors. Then, the Early Career Committee will contact potential mentors (based on suggestions listed on applications for mentoring and our committee’s knowledge of SPSP membership). The goal will be to pair two to four early career mentees with each mid-career mentor, until program capacity is reached. Mentoring teams will meet virtually regularly (e.g., monthly) and will be provided with a list of topics for discussion, but we hope conversations will also be generated organically. Ideally, mentoring would kick off and end with a celebratory event at the SPSP conference, which we hope to launch at SPSP 2023. 

Incorporating a peer mentoring model (with people at the same career stage) is likely to promote information sharing, social support, and collaboration (Bottoms et al., 2013). Thus, we hope this program will incorporate the best of both worlds: Mentoring groups will be able to rely on expertise and guidance from mid-career faculty who have somewhat recently navigated the same waters, and they will be able to make new (and possibly collaborative) connections with like-minded peers. We hope this model will not only increase the success of early career social/personality psychologists but also their confidence and well-being.