Gifts of mentoring

In June 2021, our Geriatrics-affiliated fellows and postdocs graduated. I was completely touched and honored to be given an award for my research mentoring of the Geri/Pal fellow this year. I’m so grateful the fellow wrote down what she said because it was a classic academic pandemic parenting moment. Theo was overtired, overexcited, and cutely distracting me on Zoom such that I heard little of what was said and no presence of mind to say anything in return or remember what I was supposed to do in that moment.

Perhaps I might have said that every mentoring relationship is a two-way gift. Sometimes I learn from the clinical expertise of my mentee-collaborators. Or a chance to work with them to do something I could never do alone. Sometimes I get a chance to remember how much I’ve learned and how far I’ve come, recalling how hard and confusing it all was when I started, and realizing I can help others navigate the inevitable eddies and waves and rough stretches that are part of any project or career.

If I take a moment to reflect on my internal state, it’s clear that I really love this kind of teaching and mentoring. I’ve been spending more time than is reasonable (e.g. it’s unpaid and I’m stealing it from my own research time) thinking about how to make research and qualitative analysis approachable for my team of summer students. I’m voting with my feet. I’m thinking about how I model bringing my whole person to my work, sharing the many failures and persistence that are represented in the white space of the official bios.