Incorporating a Mentorship Plan into Your Degree

While many aspects of a degree are well planned, mentorship is an aspect that is often overlooked.

Incorporating a Mentorship Plan into Your Degree

It wasn’t until halfway through my master’s program at UC San Diego did I realize I needed to create an adaptive mentorship plan. In order to graduate and feel confident going into the working world outside of my master’s, I needed to receive extra support. 

I was in the expedited BS/MS program, which combined a year’s worth of research at a lab on campus in my BS with another year’s worth of research in my MS. Because it was a degree in biology, this meant that my research would culminate in a final written and oral thesis defense. 

I had comfortably stayed at my undergraduate lab for my master’s, and while my location did not change, the expectation for my work had. 

The next year of my master’s was going to be rigorous, as my experiments were longer and required more attention, and I was a bit terrified to present my research among academics. My postdoctoral mentor had also recently left the lab and with that my primary person for direct technical guidance and career advice was no longer as easily accessible. 

It was hard to admit at the time, but I was treading in deep, deep water. I was unsure how to navigate this all with less support than I had before. 

Because of my experiences with mentorship in the past, I recognized that I needed extended support and some clarity within the mentorship I already had.

If you are asked to tackle larger responsibilities and your abilities are stretched thin, your support system will need to step up.

And because everyone is busy and has many responsibilities of their own, the only person that can catalyze this is you. Rather than expend your energy trying to cover all your bases, an investment into a mentorship plan will help tremendously. 

How does one successfully create a mentorship plan?

Firstly, it is important to differentiate a research plan from a mentorship plan. Similar to many other research-based MS programs, I submitted a research proposal during my application process. A research proposal outlines what types of experiments you will be conducting in order to answer a set of scientific questions, and how you might achieve these goals throughout your academic timeline. While it is easy for you to think your research proposal encompasses your mentorship plan, this is not the case. 

A mentorship plan recognizes the mentors that you currently have (professors, postdocs, TAs, peers etc) and what they are capable of assisting you with. From there, you may notice the gaps of support where you need it most. Much of my own anxiety from graduate school stemmed from the feeling of trying incredibly hard and still failing. This made me believe that “my best” was never going to be good enough, and that I might not complete what I had set to achieve in my master’s degree because of my own abilities. 

Although getting a degree can feel like an endeavor that is meant to be shouldered by one person, it is absolutely not designed to be done alone.

My relationship with my master’s degree pivoted when I filled my “failures” with support from the people around me. There were two major steps I took: finding new mentors and changing my relationship with current ones.

Finding New Mentors

Personally, I lacked confidence in discussing and presenting my research to other academics and knew that I needed help preparing for my oral defense. Because I knew my current mentors were extremely busy and could only offer me certan guidance, I attempted to expand my support. I employed the use of community or mosaic mentorship, which is the concept that mentorship should utilize the expertise of many mentors rather than a sole educator. I have written a blog on the impact of mosaic mentorship, which you can find below. 

One of my professors gave our class the option to present our own research in class without the pressure of receiving a grade. I used it as an opportunity to receive feedback from my professor and my peers, as well as establish a mentor relationship with my professor. If you have similar fears as me, there are also “Grad Slams” on campus where graduate students present their work and receive useful critiques. It is a great opportunity to hear the frequently asked questions that might surface during your presentation.

When picking my committee members for my thesis, which are required for most master degrees, I emphasized early on that I needed support in professional development. My second committee member was able to meet with me once a month to help craft a larger picture of life outside of my master’s. During particularly difficult sections of my program, speaking with my second committee member helped motivate me and reminded me of why I was doing my master’s in the first place. 

Changing relationships with past mentors:

While finding new mentors naturally made sense to me, it was difficult to realize that I was unable to maintain the same relationship with my previous mentors. Expectations of my work had changed, and with that, I needed to reestablish where I and my direct mentor stood.

Mentorship involves two sides of a professional relationship. As your mentor recognizes new academic potentials within you, you must be able to reflect the same onto your mentor.

Although your mentor can have the best of intentions by entrusting more elaborate work onto you, it is important to understand boundaries and how to assert them. This can help your relationship with your mentor grow as well as maintain a good work-life balance.

What is a boundary? My therapist described a boundary as a statement and an action. A boundary is a statement that defines and protects your integrity. For example, I try to maintain work-life balance by minimizing how much I immediately reply to emails over the weekend. However, boundaries must be “I-centric”, as it defines what you will do if the other person disregards your statement. Thus a boundary is also an action. 

Defining your boundaries using the “I-centric” model is both empowering and realistic, as you are not telling the other person what to do, rather, what you will do if that boundary is crossed. 

Continuing with my email example, rather than tell my mentor to not email over the weekend, I would inform them of my boundary: I won’t respond to emails over the weekend immediately, it’s best to contact me during the week. It’s to the point, polite, and defines your stance on a topic to your mentor. 

I have found with mentors, students, friends, and family members alike, that undefined boundaries will be continually crossed over and over, many times without knowing the harm it is causing. 

There may be circumstances where your boundaries will be tested, and in some cases, crossed. It is best to find a mentor who respects your boundaries and does not seek to alter your integrity regularly, whether or not they are doing this intentionally. If you find your mentor continually doing this, restating your boundaries is necessary. 

Stating boundaries early in one’s mentorship will help your professional relationship, or in more extreme cases, signal to you that you may need to seek a different mentor. 

In Summary:

Trusting another person with your academic and professional journey can be nerve wracking. Vulnerability gives others the ability to criticize you and your work, whether that criticism be hurtful or constructive. 

However, creating a plan that fills your academic space with mentors who recognize your vulnerability and choose to uplift you will only enhance your professional journey.

TDLR:

1. Recognizing that expectations placed on you by your mentor, program etc not only require changes within how you work to adapt, but also in your support system

2. You can adapt to handle more responsibilities, but your support and mentorship should equally increase. A mentorship plan will help you achieve this 

3. A research proposal is different from a mentorship plan  

4. An important aspect of a mentorship plan is receiving guidance from different people for different areas of your growth (Feel free to read my article “Mosaic Mentorship” for more on this) 

5. As your academic goals develop, you may need new mentorship or current mentors to change their area of guidance 

6. Vulnerability, at the face of supportive mentors, will help you grow tremendously