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- Donuts with a Doctor – musings on mentoring - 05/02/2019
- Advice for new Faculty - 27/07/2015
Who doesn’t like donuts? Sugary and crispy on the outside, doughy and satisfying on the inside. And it turns out that eating a donut provides the perfect opportunity for some academic mentoring. The recent Ecology and Evolution Ireland conference put on a “Donuts with a Doctor” mentoring session that brought donut lovers together to exchange experiences on career opportunities, work-life balance, skills, mobility, and whatever else could be said between bites.
I was officially designated as a “mentor”, and while I’ve had lots of personal experience as both a mentee and mentor I prepared for my role by discussing the concept of “mentoring” with my research group. We hit a roadblock right away, as the word “mentor” was a somewhat fuzzy term, and our Swiss branch pointed out that there were several words in french that covered the multiple roles of “mentor”. We explored a range of roles, including: someone wise and experienced who gives you advice, someone who has been through your experience before who can tell you about it (like a more advanced student mentoring a new student), hierarchical mentoring where your direct supervisor or boss provides guidance, and non-hierarchical peer mentoring where you are going through similar experiences in parallel.
Like all good analytical scientists, we broke it down further into explorations of formal vs. informal mentoring, whether you should have an emotional connection, the role of reciprocity, the risk of competitiveness, and how “groupthink” can occur in a mentoring relationship. We benefited from the lack of a clear definition for mentor in the earlier part of our conversation, as it enabled us to explore the multiple ways in which we all experienced mentoring in our professional and private lives. This included the recognition that you don’t need to be formally designated as a “mentor” to undertake some of these roles.
As the crumbs were brushed off at the end of my “Donuts with a Doctor” session, I reflected on whether my mentees felt comfortable in my presence, whether we had the space not to be right all the time, whether there was honesty in our conversations, whether I was able to inspire them, and most importantly whether I provided support so they could figure out their own important challenges themselves. Ultimately, a good mentor will help people to access resources that they may not have realised they had. More donuts anyone?
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About the Author
Yvonne Buckley researches and teaches population biology, conservation, ecology and ecosystem management and is the Chair of Zoology at Trinity College Dublin. She holds an IRC Laureate award, is Chair of the National Biodiversity Forum and a former President of the Irish Ecological Association. Find out more about her research here:
Website | TCD Zoology
Twitter | @y_buckley
Google Scholar | Profile