Malaz Boustani, M.D., MPH, discusses why mentorship must be understood and valued by the scientific community.
Transcript:
One of the biggest mistakes in the scientific community is we don’t highlight that without mentorship there won’t be successful transfer of knowledge and information and growth. So most people don’t value mentorship. They don’t even know mentorship is one of their options. They don’t know how crucial that is. So that’s across the entire field. They confuse mentorship with a boss. They confuse mentorship with advising. They confuse mentorship with coaching. So that’s the biggest problem.
Now, the second problem, the mentor/mentee relationship, it’s usually not a very equitable relationship, and in a way, the benefit of the mentorship, a lot of it, if it’s not 90% of the benefit of the mentorship, is for the mentee. So the mentor has to have a mindset of paying forward because they got mentorship before. So that the essence of creating a cohesive social organization across generations.
Dr. Boustani describes the social contract needed to ensure the best mentorship experience.
Transcript:
We have to have a social contract in the beginning. So that’s our process. Social contract where I have to put the mentee first, and actually my mentor, Chris Callahan, did not allow me to mentor people until I guaranteed for him that I would put the mentee first.
Dr. Boustani talks about why establishing the right mentoring relationship is crucial.
Transcript:
For a scientist, you need to have time and space for being trained. So you need somewhere between 50% to 75% of your time protected over a certain period of time — usually three years — to actually get the time and space to develop the competency you need to become a successful independent scientist. But outside of that time and space, if you don’t have the right mentorship process and the right mentor, then that 75% protection was wasted or has a high chance of being wasteful for the institution and also for the mentee and the mentor.
