Mentor training allows mentors and mentees to discover what they do best

By Chuck Carlson

Dr. Adam Lauver remembers his days as a graduate student at the University of Michigan and how, despite doing important science that would enhance human knowledge and his career, the experience was sometimes less than joyful.

His mentor, he recalls, was an old-school professor nearing retirement age, and his way of running a lab was set in concrete. “You either did it his way, or you got out,” Dr. Lauver recalled.

For Dr. Lauver, who planned to be a professor with his own lab one day, that experience proved to be the ever-popular teachable moment. “I learned a lot about what not to do,” he said.

Now a recently promoted Associate Professor in Michigan State University’s Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology, Lauver has a research program, and thanks to his past experiences and his participation in mentor training, he believes his students are doing outstanding science in a welcoming and respected atmosphere.

“I try to find some balance between giving students their personal space and making sure they’re professionally productive toward the goal,” he said. “That’s what everyone wants, the goal.”

For PhmTox Department Chair Dr. Anne Dorrance, the mentor/mentee dynamic has always been important. Not unlike Dr. Lauver, when she was doing her Ph.D. studies at the University in Glasgow in Scotland, it wasn’t always a walk in the park with her mentors. She also learned some valuable lessons.

“When I became Ph.D. program director at MSU, I realized most of the student problems were not actually the student’s problem, but problems in the relationship with the mentor,” she said. “Sometimes these problems are small, but if they are left to fester, they get blown out of proportion. If we want to train new scientists who can inspire the generation that comes after them, we need to be better mentors.”

Dr. Dorrance has embraced that goal, and for the last 12 years, she has been offering mentor training at MSU.

She was initially introduced to the mentor training program developed by the University of Wisconsin’s Center for the Improvement of Mentored Experiences in Research (CIMER) in 2012 through a collaboration with the Graduate School at MSU.

In 2019, she traveled to Wisconsin to become a certified mentor training facilitator and has been running regular workshops ever since. The CIMER program has influenced how research mentoring is approached across many academic institutions throughout the United States.

“The idea is you bring together like-minded individuals who are interested in becoming better mentors, and you learn from each other,” said Dr. Dorrance, who facilitates the 10-week-long mentoring program currently being run through the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology and the Integrative Pharmacological Sciences Training Program.

“There’s nothing prescriptive about this program. It’s a lot of discussion-based case studies with a little bit of information on best practices. It’s about learning to be your best self as a mentor. We are all learning to be better mentors over time, but doing mentor training allows you to speed up the process because you learn from everybody else. You’ve got to make mistakes as a mentor to figure out what makes a good mentor or a bad mentor.”

Mentoring is a key element in research labs where students put their trust, and often their futures, in the hands of their professors. By the same token, professors can excel in their research by ensuring their mentees receive the support they need.

“When things are bad, or when things are going on personally, how can you support that student to be successful?” Dr. Lauver said. “Because that’s important for me too. If I can’t help them to be successful, I can’t be successful either. How students get to their goals differs and identifying that early is big. It takes effort.”

The mentor training workshops are a large part of the Integrative Pharmacological Sciences Training Program, which Dr. Dorrance co-directs. This program is funded by a T32 grant from the National Institute of General Medicine, and mentor training is required.

“People start thinking of mentoring as a one-way street. It’s me imparting my knowledge to a student, and there’s no give-back,” Dr. Dorrance said. “Most people, when they get through their workshop, come to the place that it’s very much a two-way street, and you’re often learning as much from the mentee as they are from you. When you see that switch, it’s really cool.”

The workshop covers various topics, including good lab communication, life/work integration, setting expectations, and diversity.

“But diversity is not just in terms of race, gender, and ethnicity,” Dr. Dorrance said. “You’ve got undergraduates in your lab; you have lab technicians who have been here for 40 years; you have Ph.D. students, and you have non-traditional students. You’re thinking of diversity as a large group and how to work with teams like that.”

Mentoring continues to evolve, and that’s one reason Dr. Lauver has taken the workshop three times, just to remain fresh and up to date. “A constant refresher allows you to stay in that zone of being adaptable,” he said. “I think the best mentors are adaptable because every student is idiosyncratic. They have different goals and different backgrounds, histories, and training. How do you support that individual? One size doesn’t fit all.” And it’s that goal Dr. Dorrance hopes will keep the mentor training program viable, informative, and practical.

Asked what she believes makes a successful mentor, she pauses.

“Are your students happy and successful?” she said. “You can have a happy-as-can-be student who’s not a successful scientist, but that does not make you a good mentor. Are you getting that balance of students who feel fulfilled and supported and are actually getting somewhere, making discoveries, and gaining new knowledge? Do they get to discover things nobody else knew? A good mentor facilitates that and empowers that.”