On Being the Imposter Mentor
I’m an early-career scientist, and I’m not entirely sure when that will change. At what point does a junior statistician become a mid-career or senior statistician? Tenure-line faculty typically measure this by the Assistant-Associate-Full Professor yardstick, but there isn’t really an analogous line for quantitative staff (non-tenure-line faculty have this same chronology, but it means something a little different than for tenure-line faculty). Oftentimes, junior staff statisticians become the mentor for more junior staff statisticians. The expectation is that this peer mentorship structure (if it’s even well enough defined to be called a ‘structure’) will allow the less-junior person the ability to learn how to lead and mentor by being a leader and a mentor while the more-junior person starts learning the job, the institution, and the field.
We see it in situations just like this where the less-junior person still sees themselves as simply “junior,” and has no business being any sort of mentor. It’s like we have suddenly become an imposter! The real punchline, though, is that even senior people sometimes see themselves this way, especially when it comes to being a good mentor. We do our coursework to earn our credentials and learn methodologies and perhaps even a domain area of practice. We attend professional development seminars, webinars, and workshops to hear about new methodologies, how to navigate the intricacies of grant proposals, how to work with difficult collaborators or to be come a better communicator, or to learn the skills necessary to become a good team scientist, but very seldom is being a good mentor a topic of training. It’s not that we, as quantitative scientists, don’t value good mentorship; it’s that for the most part, few scientists know it in any way that can be rigorously taught.
Coursework tells us the how, on-the-job training tells us the what and why, networking tells us the who and where, and professional development tells us the what else. But mentorship is not a rigorous hard skill that can be taught the same way as mixed effects models or how to write tidy Python code. Mentorship is an active, intuitive, humanistic pursuit that requires us to ask the right questions at the right times, to evaluate our own tendencies and modes of operating, and identify potential pitfalls before they happen. As a result, there is no single one-size-fits-all approach to becoming a good mentor. Understanding the person you are mentoring is not a skill, it’s just human, and I’d wager most of us were human long before we became scientists.
My advice to you, then, is to not be afraid of being in the less-junior mentor position; it will likely teach you more about how to be a good mentor than simply taking a class and applying a series of steps. Your mentees are their own people, and will require their own unique development plan just like you have for yourself. It’s like I tell my mentees: Doing something is better than doing nothing. Even if you make a mistake, it means that you did something, and that’s a good start.