Good mentoring 1

Today my postdoc advisor and I talked about the experiments I'm working on right now. In my corner of biology, people usually do experiments every day or nearly so. In many instances, computer programming can facilitate those experiments, so it can be valuable to pause experiments while working on code. However, it is hard to justify taking time off of doing experiments, even if that time will be spent making future experiments more efficient.

This is tricky in part because it involves mentor/mentee assumptions about how frequently one should be doing experiments. I'm sure even those of you in different areas of research know that many advisor relationships founder because assumptions or expectations go unstated....to disastrous effect.

Anyhow, today Advisor said explicitly that it would be fine for me to spend the next two weeks, or even a month, writing code and in other ways optimizing experimental protocol, so that when I got around to doing experiments again they would be significantly more efficient. This is good news because I've wanted to spend some time coding but hesitated in fear that Advisor would see me and think, "Hmm, Dr. Jekyll is slacking off experiments....again" and downgrade his opinion of me accordingly.

This is a long-winded way of saying: those of you who are in a position to mentor people--you presumably know this already, but do take the time to lay out your expectations clearly. People who are anxious to please you, while also anxious to get data, will appreciate it.