Invest Without Return

Academic mentoring is strange in many ways.

I never intended to be an academic. I was working as an aerospace engineer when I decided to do a PhD in astrophysics. I had never taken any astronomy classes, so I had to play catch-up during my PhD. And throughout the PhD I never intended to stay in academia. It was only in the last year of my PhD that I thought I might stay for a postdoc.

That means that early on I never really thought about forward-planning my academic career. My experience was very different to many of the excellent undergraduate students I have met and mentored today, who decided long ago that they wanted to be academics, and have been working towards that goal for years. My experience is simply that I was very late to start forward-planning my career, but I took initiative and got lucky in finding people who could advise me, even when I didn’t think I needed that advice.

I’ve been lucky to have had some great mentors, and I have been lucky to have some bad ones. I learned a lot from the good ones, and I learned a lot very quickly from the bad ones. Much of my approach to mentoring comes from the good mentors I have had, and the bad ones I have learned from (e.g., “don’t be like that”).

This document is a collection of my thoughts on academic mentoring, and how I approach it. It’s an incomplete set of thoughts, but it is probably as close to being an ‘introduction’ as one gets. New thoughts will probably be added as separate posts over time.

I think this post would only change if my overall philosophy towards mentoring changed.

The mix of mentor-mentee relationships

Mentor-mentee relationships can start in a wide variety of contexts. Very few of them are formal. I have mentored many students and postdocs who I have never worked with, some I’ve never met in person. But I treat all of these relationships as mentoring relationships, even if they are not part of some formal program. The reason I do that is because if you don’t see it as a mentoring relationship, then you won’t invest the necessary time and effort into it. And if you don’t invest the time and effort, then you won’t be able to help the mentee.

Some mentor-mentee relationships start formally, such as through a mentoring program. But most start informally, such as when a student approaches a professor for advice. In these cases, the mentor-mentee relationship is often not defined, and the mentor may not even know they are a mentor. But that doesn’t mean that the relationship is not important! The mentor might be the only person that the mentee is seeking advice from, and what if the mentor does not even know they are a mentor?!

This is just to say that it is important to seek many mentors. You don’t always have to follow their advice, but you should always listen to it. And if you are going to act against their advice, you should tell your mentor, just so they know you are not ignoring them, and so you can better understand their perspective (i.e., why they gave that advice in the first place). It helps you to close the loop and keep the relationship strong: any good reason to communicate with your mentor is a good opportunity to reach out.

The mentee’s perspective

What does a mentee really want from a mentor? They might want advice, a sounding board, some ideas on how to navigate a prickly situation. Or they might want someone to tell them what they don’t consciously want to hear. For example, I had one mentor tell me “you need to write more papers”. It’s very reasonable, and they were right. I did need to write more papers. So I did. But I didn’t ask for that advice, and I didn’t consciously want to hear it. But I needed to hear it, and I am grateful that they told me.

So what does a mentee actually think when they are seeking a mentor? I think they are looking for someone who has been there, done that, and can give them advice on how to navigate the academic world. They want someone who can help them avoid the pitfalls they have encountered, and who can help them make the most of the opportunities that come their way.

But everyone is different. And so every mentor-mentee relationship is different. Trying to treat them the same is folly and might be a waste of time, but there are some common themes that I have found to be true. If a mentee doesn’t know what they want, or doesn’t have specific questions to ask, then they probably just need guidance of what they should be thinking about. What do they want to do with their life? Where will they be in five years? Ten? In ten years, what would failure look like to them? What would success look like?

Asking those questions helps to better understand why someone is doing what they are doing. Maybe they know these things already but have never articulated them. But often they don’t! We get caught up in life itself that we often don’t think deeply about the future and what we want from it. Asking these questions helps the mentee to clarify what they are doing, and why they are doing it.

But more importantly, it gives the mentor the context to understand how they can help. If a student comes to me for advice and they want to work in industry in a few years and own a multi-million dollar company, then the advice I will give them is different from the student who wants to be a professor at a research-intensive university. I’d be having very different conversations with each student. I’d be conducting mock interviews with one of them about running a startup, and with the other about how to write a compelling research proposal.

Mentors can’t be effective if they don’t know what the mentee wants.

The mentor’s perspective

I’d bet that most mentees don’t often think about the mentor’s perspective.

I think that is a (small) mistake. Mentors are people too, and they have their own lives, their own careers, and their own goals. They are not there to serve the mentee, but rather to help them. And that means that the mentor needs to be able to invest time and effort into the relationship, and that takes time away from their own work.

When mentors invest in a mentee, they are investing in the future. They are investing in the next generation of academics, and they are investing in the future of their field. But that investment is not always easy. It takes time, effort, and sometimes even money. And it is not always clear what the return on that investment will be.

And mentees probably only see a small fraction of what that investment looks like.

As a mentee you might meet with your mentor every now and then for a chat, or correspond by email. Mentees might think that is all there is to it. Great mentors are investing a lot more than that. When you’re in their “mentoring circle” you are among the people they will advertise you and your work at conferences, they will write you letters of recommendation (often when you don’t even know they are doing it), and they will advocate for you when you are not in the room. That’s great! And it’s part of their role as a mentor. But it also involves them spending their political capital on you. They are using their word to advertise you at conferences, to stake their claim that you are the right candidate for a job, or that you are the right person to work with on a project. They are using their reputation to help you build yours.

Reputations are hard to build and easy to lose. Mentors are investing their reputation in you, and that is a big deal. They are putting their name on the line for you, and that is not something to be taken lightly. The good mentors will never tell you that they are doing this. But when you are leaning on your mentors for support in your own career, it is worth knowing that they are putting some of their own reputation on the line for you.

If you’re open and honest with your mentors about your goals and what you want to achieve, that’s totally fine. They will work with you to achieve those. But if you ask your mentors for support on Job A – the job of your dreams – and then you snub Job A when you get it, then the Job A committee will be asking questions of your mentors more than you. Sometimes a mentor will feel compelled to send a private note to the committee chair explaining that there was some sharp change in thinking, but you really did think they wanted that job, etc.

Some mentors get a little exhausted by this. I don’t, but I understand why they do. Mentors are investing in you, and they want to see a return on that investment. But that return is not always clear, and it is not always immediate. And sometimes the return is not what the mentor expected.

You must invest without return

This is why my approach to academic mentoring is that you must invest without return.

If you agree to mentor someone, formally or otherwise, then you are allocating some of your time, effort, and political capital to that person. You are investing in them, but you must invest without any expectation of return. That is, you must be willing to invest in them without expecting anything in return. You must help them even if it does not help you. You must help them even if it does not help your career. You must help them even if it does not help your reputation. You must help them because you want to help them, and because you believe in them.

And you must do that even if they do the opposite of everything you say! If you spend time, effort, and political capital to get a dream academic job created specifically for a mentee, and they wake up one day and see on LinkedIn that they left that job for one in industry, you must congratulate them and ask if they need help negotiating salaries for their new job. Yes, you spent a lot of time, effort, and capital to get them that academic job, but that is the nature of mentoring. You must invest without return.

You can’t expect anything! You can’t expect them to take your advice. You can’t expect them to follow your guidance. You can’t expect them to do what you think is best for them. You can’t expect them to stay in academia, or to stay in the field, or to stay in the job you helped them get. You can’t expect them to do anything. You must invest without return.

Otherwise if you expect anything then it is no longer mentoring, it is transactional. It’s not a relationship; it’s quid pro quo. And it cannot be that because mentoring is joint project to try to help someone achieve their goals, even if those goals are not the same as your own, and even if those goals change in an instant.

Often in my mentoring relationships, external people will never even know that I did anything to mentor them. That’s the best kind of investment! Behind the scenes I would have connected those people through my network to open opportunities for them, I would have reviewed grant and job applications, and written letters of recommendation. But all I did was try to even the playing field for them a little bit. Their success is their own, I just cheerleaded along the way. And you can only do that if you invest without return.

And when you invest without return, you will be surprised at how much you get in return. You’ll learn more about yourself. You’ll think more creatively about how to open opportunities for others, and how to raise people up to help them achieve great things. You’ll get to see their happiness with their success, and you’ll get to share in that success. And you’ll get to see them achieve things you never thought possible. And that is the best return on investment you can get.