PostdocPartum #9: Master apprentice
1700 words, 7 minutes
I started mentoring a student this past summer as a research assistant. This Fall semester, which started in early August, she is starting her Master's research program, a 19-week stretch that should include an independent research project and a written and submitted thesis.
During my PhD years, I did a fair amount of mentoring younger graduate students and my peers, and I also volunteered my time at local K-12 schools. I've also served my tours of duty as teaching assistant for the School of Materials Science and Engineering, spending equal amounts of time hissing and being dismayed by Georgia Tech undergraduates. But mentoring a Master's student 1-on-1, on the level of scientific research, is definitely new territory for me. What's even more challenging is having my project manager, who is MY mentor, leave at the same time. Suffice to say, I've had some anxiety. Here, placed into my hands is a responsibility to nurture someone into scientific work. It's not some one-off mentoring luncheon or helping someone get their feet on the ground in Atlanta, not one of thirty undergraduates to wrangle 15 minutes at a time during office hours. This is one person's future, one person's life trajectory that I'm influencing. The skills she learns in these 4 months are what she will write on her CV and affect what jobs she can obtain. The graduate student-advisor mentorship is something special and although she is not a PhD student, it is nevertheless a task I do not take lightly.
Teaching is packaging knowledge into understandable and transferable units. But for me, teaching is also a fulfilling and emotionally satisfying activity. I feel like so much is gained from teaching, collectively and individually. For myself, teaching challenges my assumptions about my own knowledge and forces me to retread the consistency of my logic. When I teach, I can feel the gains in efficiency in society. I showed someone the way to knowledge, so they can go farther and faster to somewhere newer. I can feel the advancement of human knowledge, the gears of intelligence catching, straining, and slowly turning the whole thing of human civilization. Each track of the tank tread is one human, the teacher, linked to another human, the student, none of who live long enough to see where the whole thing goes. And yet, somehow, it all perseveres forward, with ignorance crunching underneath.
Waxing metaphorical aside, taking on a Master's student has had the same fulfilling feelings but the personal mentor-mentee relationship has been intimidating. I'm challenged by having to trust someone else with their work because it influences mine, and striking a fine balance of verifying without doubting, pushing but not shoving, being gentle with correcting but firm with teaching, being authoritative but compassionate, of leading but not abandoning. Even more difficult is my self-discipline: I can be so generous and selfless to others that I bankrupt myself of time for my own priorities. I'm prone to underestimate my skills and overestimate my energy, which could leave me decrepit of taking care of my own career growth while my Master's student flits off to a job after submitting what is sure to have been a beautiful thesis and graduation. This is one of my worries, as I feel myself sinking deeper into bad habits from my PhD and the precariousness of the postdoc position grows more perilous.
On top of all of that, there are other questions and concerns persisting in my mind. I think that nowadays, being steeped in so much awareness about the plight of women in STEM, things like subconscious bias cling to my thoughts like stubborn ivy. Am I letting her speak for herself enough? Am I providing enough autonomy about her activities? Am I refraining from expressing observations that are subtly gender-based judgments and stereotypes? I've been a social activist and tried to be an ally to the movement, but now I'm put to the real test of adhering to that value system instead of contributing to its undermining simply by my subconscious nature of being male.
The most fearsome pitfall of all is my subconscious biases leading to sexual harassment, more specifically anything that could be construed in the slightest as such. I have read many publicized stories of the cycle of misbehavior, accusation, investigation, confession, apology, and deeply personal essay that it feels one mistake, perceived or actual, could be fatal. And while it seems obvious what should and should not be construed as sexual harassment, I have sensed a common thread that the accused/harasser rarely has the foresight to acknowledge their actions as wrong. I read that as a sign of how ingrained their subconscious biases towards women are, before revelations from lines being crossed, laws being broken, and women feeling violated bring such biases to the surface. It doesn't excuse their actions but it does reveal a poor calibration of their moral compass when it comes to managing respectful relations with their female colleagues and understudies. And while I pass judgment on these people, I cannot exempt myself from potentially having the very same subconscious biases. I must acknowledge that certain biases contained in my personality took residence from feeding an instinctive desire to "belong" amongst other boys and men. That realization, in juxtaposition to being a mentor to a young woman, is worrisome to no small extent.
You may consider my fear to be overblown and I should emphasize that it is not the bias itself that I fear as much as it is fear over the realization of my capacity to harm. It is akin to realizing that in striving for a moral ideal, one recognizes that the power than enables good is also capable of an equal and opposite evil. These biases are risks to be managed, to be consciously mitigated, just as our daily decisions can be a struggle between the choices of right and wrong. What gives me hope is that while the biases are unavoidable but what I do about them is not. Human nature contributes to what we think; human decency contributes to how we act.
As I'm progressing through my postdoc and seeing more of my peers abandon academic science, it seems tragic that brighter minds than mine are lost to the wayside because of the robbery of sexism. I know I'm motivated by the right intentions but still that's not enough; actions and outcomes matter as well. What use are good intentions against the injustices that women in science face? Now that power has been placed in my hands, how will I measure up to the test? It's clear that the status quo is insufficient, but having been trained in that very system, my default mode of operation will be subconscious extension of that status quo the scientific community writ large has deemed unsuitable. "How will I know if I'm doing something wrong?" Well, that I should know. That much should be clear and I think my student would voice her concerns if I was doing something wrong. No, it is the question, "how will I know I've done enough?", that harangues me in my daily interactions with her.
When I turn around and "look up" for advice, I don't see a mentor of my own to calm my doubts with insightful reassurances. Not only is my immediate mentor gone, but despite Norway's gender-equality progressiveness, my local scientific research community is still heavily male-dominated (granted, the ratio is better than it is in the U.S.). Nor have I developed a mature enough relationship with any colleague, female or otherwise, to feel comfortable asking for advice. Lastly, it sounds bad, but there are frankly more urgent tasks in my postdoc (and teaching/service experience is a relatively poor career currency compared to, say, publications).
I'm not sure if being in a country whose entire political spectrum of left, right, and center is still left of the American political center, whose core cultural ideals embody gender equality to an uncanny degree makes it better or worse for me. On the one hand, gender equality and the support of women is written directly into Research Council proposal mandates and there is no sociopolitical resistance to such effort (noticeably absent is the mention of underrepresented minorities bit that usually accompanies such language, although that topic is perhaps best reserved for another time). On the other hand, what are the subconscious biases of Norwegians like? Could their standard of expectation be so much higher than what an American like me could deliver? Not that the Norwegians would confront me with it, unless if it were egregiously law-breaking. But that's not really my concern; it's the sinister subtext that women (and others who are slighted and marginalized) receive and that we who are in power unwittingly deliver. It's a subtle, unsettling turn of the stomach they get that when they don't feel like they belong to an amorphously defined field like science. I know that feeling of being an outsider, because I've had it before myself.
It is taxing to keep all of these things in mental orbit, but then again, so is everything that is worthwhile. And there isn't much to do but keep stumbling forward. The immediacy of what needs to be done with regards to the needs of my research and my student's thesis research presses on, with many of the 19 weeks already consumed. Additionally, her being my first student that I have seriously mentored, I'm not sure how many of my concerns are conflated with simply the anxiety of being a mentor for the first time. For all that I can do, I'm learning that part of being a mentor is having faith that my student is strong enough to survive the thorns of a bramble maze that only she can navigate. And day by day, as she works on the important research task of improving our Li-ion batteries, she's teaching me quickly she can learn and grow to handle adversity in the lab. Even if I'm not doing the best a mentor can for her, she's still passionate about renewable energy, the environment, and making a difference in the world. And the way the world is going, we are going to need her.
