Choosing a mentor

My advisor is a great guy, but more of a "super-mentor": he'll advise me, but he has evolved beyond even being a PI so he doesn't really have any projects of his own --- some are farmed out elsewhere, plus there are others in the department doing relevant work. Now that I've sent off my last paper, I am choosing new projects, which means choosing additional mentors.

During college and grad school, I've had many mentor relationships. Initially I started out looking for subject matter that interested me, but I'm enough of a deletante that practically everything sounds interesting to me, so I realized that the quality of the mentor mattered more than the quality of the project. It's possible to find an interesting angle on many subjects, but not possible to make an indifferent mentor better. I haven't always stuck with this rule, but when I have, it's been really helpful.

The first RA-ship that went well for me led directly to grad school. I was applying for an RA at a research center the summer before graduation, and interviewed with two advisors. The one whose research sounded totally boring and whose academic background wasn't similar to my interests turned out to be the nicest guy and we had a great conversation that lasted well longer than it was supposed to --- very much like a good date. The one who did a wide range of interesting research and had an academic background like the one I wanted to get turned out to be the rational sort who doesn't really try to connect with people. I went with the former, and while the project was a little random, it was a success. I stayed motivated the whole summer (although I also remember an extensive email correspondence with the guy I had a crush on then; who wasn't, in the end, interested in spite of spending 2 hours a day emailing me.), and created out a project that I'm still proud of. While presenting the project, I met a woman who served on my committee and was one of the most helpful members. I haven't gone back to the subject matter, but it helped me get into grad school, so that's worth something.

By contrast, the advisor who I did not have chemistry with ended up being my first academic advisor in grad school and a complete disaster.

The rule does not always work, though. In early/mid-grad school (grad school was long enough that it not only has a middle, it also has a beginning of the middle), I had an RA-ship with a fantastic professor. He was always in his office and available to talk, and dropped nuggets of advice about academia, and had us to his beach house for a day every summer (and not to dig him a pool, as I heard from someone who was a grad student in the early 70's: a professor asked them to his beach house and they were all excited, and when they got there, he handed them shovels. And they actually constructed the tennis court or pool or whatever.) He sat down with me and walked me through writing my first paper, which got well-published. I could not have done the writing without him. So it was really a great relationship. My research for the center was not so exciting, but he was accessible and helped my own research along.

And then at the very end of the paper-writing process, he put his name on my paper. He made some "track changes" edits in Word, one of which was adding his name to the authorship line. I checked the journal's authorship guidelines and writing help was not sufficient for being an author (thank god for authorship guidelines! I had thought before they were a formality, but hadn't realized how much they protected junior people!), so I told him that he didn't qualify and sent back the next revision without his name. Next edit comes back to me with his name put right back in the authorship line.

I spoke with my (male) advisor and with the (female) director of graduate studies and got two conflicting pieces of advice: keep him on because he deserves something for his time and no way in hell should he get authorship on a paper that he did not do the actual work. I listened to the latter, dropped him from my committee, and dropped a chapter of my life. (E.g., I can't say that I once worked in his research area.) And I never completely trusted my advisor's advice again. So the "good mentor" rule of selecting research projects does not always work. I couldn't have foreseen that difficulty from any of my prior interactions with him or from anything anyone had ever told me.

I'm thinking a lot about these lessons as I'm choosing my next projects. I'm meeting some genuinely nice people and some politically nice people. And junior faculty, who can't really afford to be nice at all. The politically nice people are the department chairs and others who manage large numbers of people, and while they all seem nice it's always a matter of inference how nice they are in reality. Somehow the politically nice people are disproportionately tall, male (even in heavily female departments), and not overweight.

The genuinely nice people are the sorts who could fit in very well as small college faculty, and really like to mentor. I met one today. We had a meeting with a politically nice person, a junior faculty member, and him. The meeting closed with the politically-nice guy saying, "One thing you'll find about [this university] is that everyone is friendly and accessible." I smiled and said "Great!" because I found that idea completely laughable, but they probably interpreted my smile as agreement and "great" as non-sarcastic. After the meeting, I was feeling a bit overwhelmed because they'd just listed about half a dozen projects I could join, and I ended up speaking with the senior nice guy in the hallway as we walked back to our respective places (naturally, the meeting was in the political guy's corner office), and he gave me some much-needed and sensible-sounded overview advice and he sent me 4 emails within an hour of the meeting with background materials.

(Interestingly, he is short. I wonder how many of the good advisors are short, versus political ones are tall. A short male friend of mine once turned me onto this advantage that tall men have, and I read a book about it, and I keep noticing examples.)

So I'm excited. One potential project has a guy who wants to hug my advisor. Another one dispenses sensible advice. Some progress! Now I just have to do my part and come up with something.