All You Need Is Mentorship

I find it humbling to confess that most of the truly original ideas that have driven my research group’s agenda over four decades of time have come, not from my own brain, but instead from the minds of my trainees, both graduate students and post-docs. This on its own might explain why I, rather selfishly, have given them long leashes, allowing them to strike out on their own and craft their own research trajectories. But there has also been a slightly more altruistic agenda: recently arrived trainees often assume that mastery of a set of experimental strategies and a familiarity with the relevant scientific literature should represent the core of their training. I, in stark contrast, have always viewed my own job quite differently, hoping to train my mentees to think independently, to think critically about their own work and that of others and, most importantly, to develop a sense of which problems are important conceptually and which are, in one way or another, trivial and not worth their time. Developing this last element in the cognitive toolkit is ultimately the most challenging one for many, who would rather direct their experimental agenda toward problems that are sure to yield abundant data rather than those that actually matter. In a time when generating large datasets and mastering novel, elegant technologies has become progressively easier, the temptations increase inexorably to embrace what is new rather than what is truly important in remodeling our conceptual understanding. If I, as a mentor, can imbue my trainees with this last skill—a taste for important problems—I view their experience with me as a major success!