“Think Alike?” S3E6: Getting the Mentorship You Need

[00:32] Narrator

Welcome to Think Alike, a podcast from Neuronline that delves into the art and science of mentorship within the neuroscience community. Neuronline is the Society for Neuroscience's home for learning and discussion. Join or renew your SfN membership to be part of the premier neuroscience community that's pushing the field forward. Support your career and advance the field alongside your peers with year-round unlimited access to expert-led webinars, SfN annual meeting perks, and many other benefits. Become a member of the Society for Neuroscience or rejoin today at sfn.org/membership. This episode’s guests are Dr. Christian Cazares and Dr. Maribel Patiño.

[01:18] Christian Cazares

Hello everyone, my name is Christian Cazares. I'm a postdoctoral researcher in the Bradley Voytek Lab at the University of California, San Diego, and I research neurodevelopmental disorders across human data, organoid data, and mouse data.

[01:32] Maribel Patiño

My name is Maribel Patiño. I'm a physician-scientist at the University of California, San Diego. I actually did my training here in the medical scientist training program at UCSD, got my medical doctorate, and then got my PhD in neuroscience at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies under the mentorship of Ed Callaway. I'm currently a psychiatry resident and primarily doing clinical work right now, but about to start my protected research time through an NIMH research training track, so very excited about that.

[02:06] Christian Cazares

Maribel and I met as undergraduates at UC Berkeley, and then we ended up doing a postbaccalaureate research position at the University of Pennsylvania, and then we both ended up at the University of California, San Diego, as grad students. And in that very first year, as UC San Diego grad students, we founded an organization called Colors of the Brain that initially started as a mentorship organization for undergraduates interested in neuroscience. It then became a fully funded summer research program through collaboration with the Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind, and now it is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and we continue to do our summer programming, but we also have begun to expand our activities to expand the entire academic year, specifically for San Diego undergraduates. So that kind of brings me to one of the main topics that we're going to cover is: what do you think the goal of mentorship is? And does that vary depending on where you're putting that into practice?

[03:08] Maribel Patiño

Yeah, I definitely think mentorship can look very different depending on the context. So today we hope to talk a lot about our role being mentees, but also being mentors, and how to adapt depending on the situation. So to tie it back, sometimes you're in the situation where you're the mentor, and sometimes you're in a situation where you're the mentee. And then for me being a mentee is different if I'm in the clinical setting versus in the research setting, and my mentors vary a lot. I think the goals change, and the most important thing is to communicate what those goals are with your mentor, and how to think about picking mentors.

[03:57] Maribel Patiño

One thing that I try to think through is like what is the role of this particular mentor, and it's okay to have different mentors. So I have some mentors that are more career mentors. So because I am doing a physician-scientist track, it's quite challenging to find someone that exactly has done the path career and research wise, so for example I mentioned I did my training here at the Salk Institute. My mentor was Ed Callaway. He trained as a PhD alone, so it would be challenging for me to get career advice for an MD-PhD track from him. So he does a great job of mentoring me on the science, on the daily work in lab, but to get career advice I had to look for different mentors, and so for example right now I have mentors in the psychiatry residency program who are MD-PhDs.

[04:49] Maribel Patiño

And they're not my science mentors, they're not involved in the work I do, but they're my career mentors when I'm thinking about, “Well, what grant should I apply to? How should I plan the logistics of my protected research time?” And then I'm still in contact with Ed, so I still ask him for advice about scientific things, and then there's also of course clinical mentors as I'm developing my clinical skills. When I'm thinking about how to best become a better psychiatrist, I have clinical mentors. And that's okay. One mentor doesn't have to fill all roles, and that's something that's very important to think about. But I would love to hear from you what you think about what the goals of mentorship should be and how you go about having those discussions with your mentors.

[05:33] Christian Cazares

Yeah I think because everybody has walked different paths in life, they're going to have different views of what the point of mentorship is. I think an underrated skill when you start your research career is figuring out what that style is going to be and whether it's the right fit for you. I think whether their goals and your goals match should be a priority, 100%. I see time and time again, unfortunately graduate students that have a very set career goal of going to industry in mind as soon as they start grad school, but then that conversation unfortunately gets delayed with their mentor who may typically train individuals who go into academia. What I've seen is that tends to cause a lot of friction in graduate school, and I think one of the first things that you should set out when you start that mentorship relationship, when you're doing your rotations for example, is really lay out like what does the end of this training look like. And I think as a PI you might have a mentee that is maybe not the most forthcoming with this information. It's okay to open up that conversation, and if you do so in a way that it's like non-judgmental, they might be able to be more honest about what that career goal might be. Because let me tell you like when you're starting out you have this view of academia that everybody wants you to be a research professor, and if you deviate in any way from that career path it might be seen as like, “Oh, you're letting your mentor down” or something like that, and I think that culture has largely changed, but nonetheless that conversation needs to be had.

[07:03] Christian Cazares

So some mentors I think are going to have a different career angle for you, but I really think that the main goal of this mentorship relationship should be the opposite. How do you get your mentee to the goal that they want to reach in their career? I think when you do that from the beginning it really, I don't know, it removes a lot of pressure. Because then as a PI you can start thinking about, “Okay, it kind of seems like they might want to do an industry internship, so I need to think about what that summer might look like and start planning now, who's going to get trained to fill up that experiment or who's going to get trained to finish that paper.” And I think in terms of on the mentee side it also opens up a lot of time because now you can start looking for internships without feeling guilty that you're going to lay that surprise on your PI literally the week before the internship starts.

[07:56] Christian Cazares

So for me the goal of mentorship is how do you get to your next position, how do you get employed, especially in this day and age when the job market is particularly difficult.

[08:07] Maribel Patiño

And I think you're hinting a little bit also like the concept of mentorship styles. People have different mentorship styles. And I might be hinting at my answer for the final question, but having different mentorship styles doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to be incompatible, but it does mean that you should be having a conversation at the beginning of the mentorship relationship to see if it's doable. And I think what you were saying kind of actually brought up a memory for me in terms of how my expectations have shifted throughout my career. Early on in my training I had a mentor, fantastic mentor, whose mentorship style was much more hands-on, and because it was one of my first mentoring relationships I made the assumption that's how most mentorships were.

[08:57] Maribel Patiño

And so when I started my PhD training I expected a lot more hands-on and I didn't realize that I should be making a lot more effort on my part to make my goals known. And that's something that I learned and I think something looking back I recommend to people is: ask your mentor, how do they like to mentor? You might be surprised that they're incredibly hands-off. And I've worked across the spectrum where I've had a mentor who's very hands-on and mentors that are very hands-off, and when you have different types of mentors it's very important to bring up. Like, this is how often I want to be meeting.

[09:32] Maribel Patiño

Is it doable? Even if you don't have anything to talk about at that time. For example, once I started working with mentors who were more hands-off, I started having just standing schedules, like I want to have a meeting every month, and who knows if come that day I will need the meeting but I want that meeting on the calendar. Because sometimes I feel like it would just get passed over, having these very important meetings, because I was used to a different type of mentorship. And so I think it's very important to recognize when mentorship styles are different and plan around them to make sure that your goals are being met.

[10:08] Maribel Patiño

And so when you bring up the point that some mentors, their mentorship style might be more suited for academia and if you're trying to go into industry then that's probably a conversation to have. And I think it's also at that point that it comes back to what I was saying, that you can also assess whether you’ll need another mentor also that's more connected with academia who can also help me on that path, instead of assuming that one person can have all those type of skills. 

[10:39] Christian Cazares

So on the flip side, now being a mentor and having learned those lessons, I take advice from the IRACDA program. So the IRACDA program is an NIH-funded initiative for postdocs that are doing research and teaching and one of the greatest benefits of that program is really learning how to have these conversations as a mentor. And one of the key things I learned is the idea of a mentorship compact. It's not a contract; it is an on-paper conversation about what expectations are from both the mentor and the mentee. I mean you can sign it if you want but ultimately this is just a tool to have a conversation free from distractions.

[11:20] Christian Cazares

And if you look online to different resources including those that might be affiliated with the IRACDA program you might find like templates of what a mentorship compact might look like and this often touches on ideas like how many times a week are you going to meet? When should we start thinking about grant applications? What does manuscript submission look like? Are you going to be okay with me taking some data after this position ends to a postdoc or to a faculty position? Really tough conversations but the more you delay them especially on the mentor side the more surprises you're going to get and the more assumptions you're going to find out are like completely wrong.

[12:03] Christian Cazares

So now what I do when I take on undergrads is I have them fill out not only a mentorship compact, which is really quick for me and them just like really like what do you want to get out of this experience? But also like what do you prefer our communication mode to be? Are you somebody who prefers email and is particularly good at checking it or are you somebody that needs to be messaged through Slack for example? Or just somebody that maybe might need reminders of like different things that need to get done?

[12:38] Christian Cazares

And I know I'm like that so I often tell my mentors it's like hey like is there a date that you need this by? And some people are very amenable to that without feeling like the pressure is on but if my mentee is very much like, “Oh I would prefer if you give me a date” or “I would rather prefer if you don't” then there are no surprises. And I think the very valuable skill I got out of that mentorship sort of module during the IRACDA program is learning how to have those conversations early as a mentor.

[13:08] Maribel Patiño

Yeah and I think you could almost say that we have incorporated a little bit of that into the Colors of the Brain mentorship style where we do have a conversation with all of the scholars prior to their research experience letting them know what our expectations are. Then in addition to that making them have a conversation with their primary science mentor whether that be a grad student or a postdoc to kind of get that conversation going. 

[13:53] Christian Cazares

And then another thing we do that we've learned over the years in different cohorts is having the PIs read the program's expectations for them as a PI mentor. We lay it out very clearly: Your scholar is going to present two times this summer. We will most likely help them ask for a letter of recommendation from you. We will most likely be in touch with their direct supervisor in the lab to see how progress is going or whether something needs adjustment. And one of the other things we remark is like we need you there at the end of the summer symposium because there needs to be direct involvement from the PI at that point. And I think having them understand those expectations and having them put it on a calendar really lays that out to the mentor what their role is early on as a PI.

[14:39] Christian Cazares

Yeah and I don't mean to brag but I think one of the reasons why the Colors of the Brain KIBM program is such a good program is because the faculty mentors understand that role and sign up to be a mentor understanding that the responsibilities might be a little bit more compared to other undergraduate summer research programs and their level of involvement is a lot more. For example, I've seen some faculty that don't go to the presentations of their undergrad summer research students and because we make faculty understand that before the summer starts, we have really great turnout in terms of PIs at the summer symposium which I think is really great in terms of making the scholars feel supported and that their mentors are very involved.

[15:26] Christian Cazares

Thinking about all these lessons learned, have you had any particular times when you've had to adjust through a specific experience in your mentorship relationship, either you as a mentee or you as a mentor?

[15:43] Maribel Patiño

100%. Me as a mentee – and it might not come as a surprise it happened during COVID. So I think I probably hadn't done as good a job as setting up expectations in terms of mentorship. I'm pretty independent and my mentorship was pretty hands-off and things had been working to a point. Then by the time COVID rolled around I noticed there was a time when I hadn't met with my mentor for almost two months. And I thought this probably isn't good for my science in terms of, “Is the analysis I'm doing on track? Am I on track?” In the middle of COVID, things are shutting down, and I'm not sure what's going on. That's actually when I made the decision to schedule standing meetings. When I said it earlier, it might have sounded like that was something I just knew. No, it was something I learned after feeling a little bit maybe behind in terms of my science and my research because I hadn't been meeting with my mentors often. I recognized it was probably because I hadn't made it known that I wanted to be meeting as frequently as I needed. And as soon as I said this is what I need it was very doable and we started doing that and that was very helpful for me particularly because it was COVID and I couldn't meet in person whereas pre-COVID it was very easy to just go into my mentor's office bring up a question. But I think especially when pandemics happen or the unexpected happen it might be very good to have chatted about beforehand like, how often do you want to be meeting, what do you need for your career. And so that's that's actually something that I learned and that I changed in the middle probably early in my PhD but I did have to change and adjust. What about you?

[17:34] Christian Cazares

I think I've learned to be a lot more transparent with my failures as a mentor. I think this career is full of them, whether that is grant rejections or manuscript rejections and I think some of the hidden knowledge of this career path is really conveying how often that happens and how normal it is. It is, I would say, a salient feature of this career path is how you pick yourself up after getting these rejections. I think something that I now have in my back pocket whenever a mentee of mine makes a mistake in an experiment is I have a story of when I made probably an even bigger mistake. I'm very liberal with telling that story and I'm very honest about telling that story and what I wish I would have known. I think not only does it kind of like calm down my mentee and let them know that like, “Oh, this is something that happens even to people that I think are like more trained than me,” but it also helps normalize what failure looks like in this career path. I think it also really provides an opportunity for me to teach one of the most critical things I think mentees should learn is: when you make a mistake, communicate it as fast as possible. Don't hesitate, I think sometimes especially with undergrads it might be their first time sort of being perceived as like, “Oh no, I didn't measure up to standards,” because maybe they come from like really high-achieving backgrounds from high schools, valedictorians, etc. I think that one of the first challenges as a mentee is opening up and being honest about when you've messed up. And I think I use my story of how I messed up in the lab where I ruined an entire cohort of like 12 different mice that I trained for over a month to basically convey that the reason that wasn't so bad is because I literally told my mentor right away and we were able to start planning about what other mice to order and how to order more probes for the experiment. Because any delay in that would have maybe delayed some embarrassment and that's understandable on the side of the mentee – it's very human – but ultimately you're there for the science itself and not necessarily for your ego. So not being honest with those mistakes and not being honest with failure on both sides of the equation can delay the science and ultimately that's what we're here for.

[20:10] Maribel Patiño

Yeah my go-to story when I'm teaching the Colors of the Brain summer boot camp and I'm teaching IHC is when I was an undergrad and I accidentally spilled an entire bottle of primary antibody which was quite expensive and I always start the session by saying that to encourage them. Sometimes some students are more hesitant to be hands-on, especially people that don't have a molecular background, and I think kind of setting that up letting them know that it's okay to make mistakes and we're here to teach them, and the role for us is to help them if they run into something. I think it's always very well received so I'm glad you brought that up.

[20:52] Maribel Patiño

But what about in terms of… do you see that on the opposite side, in terms of your mentors letting you know what their career was like and has that been helpful to you?

[21:01] Christian Cazares

I mean one of the things that I'm most happy about working with Brad Voytek at UCSD is that he has a little bit of notoriety on the internet because he posted what is known as like a CV of failures. I remember even before I even knew a lot about him seeing that and being like, “Wow, look at all these rejections. Look at all these like manuscripts that didn't get in on the first or second try.” And I found it very admirable to see somebody at his career stage be very transparent about it. I think that kind of left a very long-lasting impression and I think in the conversations we've had since then, especially now that I'm a postdoc in his lab, I've learned more about his career path and how he's been able to turn things around and how he's been able to keep the lab open even right now. I think it’s a very important conversation to have: funding difficulties and being able to find money to pay for your students, postdocs, and grad students. It is becoming harder and harder and I'm really grateful to Brad for laying a very transparent outlook of what my future might look like if I were to go on the job market anytime soon and so I appreciate his transparency and I think that is something that I'm 100% going to take with me with my own mentees.

[22:27] Maribel Patiño

One question I had kind of as we're coming towards the end I think. Based on everything we've chatted about do you think it's critical for mentors and mentees to think alike?

[22:43] Christian Cazares

I don't think it's critical to think alike. I think what gets communicated is what should be similar. I think you can have different perspectives on the same agreement and I think a mentor should think way more long term than a mentee. They just think about like how do I help my grad student maybe get a postdoc if they think that they're going to do an academic career path early. Start promoting them in the right conferences, start inviting them to do reviews if you get invited to do a review as a PI. Whereas with the mentee there might be a little bit more of short-term thinking in being able to communicate the more day-to-day science necessities, but ultimately the goal is still the same: how do we do well as a partnership? as a professional partnership to be able to get to the next career stage? So the outcome should be shared, but the motivations I think it's very natural for them to be different. Especially because you cannot avoid the power dynamic in these situations and there's ways to have the power dynamic be expressed in healthy ways. 

[23:56] Maribel Patiño

So I think it's actually beneficial to not think alike. I think coming from the place as a mentee I think my mentorship style has evolved so much over the years by working with people that have different mentorship styles from myself, that have different perspectives on how to do science. And I think it has been very helpful for me to kind of pick and choose what I like about mentorship styles and incorporate that into how I mentor mentees. And so if my mentors had been exactly the same as me from the beginning I don't think it would have allowed me to evaluate my own mentorship style and evolve it so that I could be most useful for my mentees or trainees. So I think it's actually been quite helpful to have quite different mentors that at one point or another weren't necessarily thinking like me, and then kind of incorporating what I wanted. I wouldn't say I'm exactly like any of my mentors right now and I probably have a different style compared to everyone I've had training from. But I think that's what's great is that you develop as a scientist, you develop as a mentor, based on all these different experiences. You would have to ask my mentees what they think about my mentorship style, but I think what's allowed me to be a little bit more flexible is having undergone all those different experiences from different types of mentors. 

[26:19] Christian Cazares

And ideally you pick the best qualities of each mentor.

[23:56] Maribel Patiño

I would hope that's what I'm doing! Again you would have to ask my mentees. I haven't heard otherwise. But I think if you had seen me when I was an undergraduate scientist I had a particular way of doing things and it was very much like my way or the highway, this is how things are done. Throughout the years that's changed a lot and I'm more understanding of mentees wanting to do things a little differently, communicating a little differently, and just having that type of flexibility for their own careers and for their own goals. I think that's a result of the type of mentorship I've had, which I think has been taking more of the positives.

[26:22] Christian Cazares

I think it has become very apparent in the program that we founded, through Colors of the Brain and our partnership with the Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind. At this point I think we funded 39 undergraduates, each with different goals, different backgrounds, research experiences, year in undergrad, and while they might not work directly with us scientifically, we've had to administer their experiences on a very broad level. Like are they having a good time? Are they learning the things that they wanted to learn before embarking on the summer lab experience? I think we've seen a lot of variety in what can happen, what can go wrong, but also what can work well. And I think that's directly translated to at least my ability to be way more flexible about what my mentees can do or how they do it. I think in general my style has become way more relaxed. When I was like a postbaccalaureate student supervising an undergrad I think I was a little more like, “This is what you got to do every day. Let's check in on progress on the experiment.” Now I learned to trust that things will get done and fortunately that's worked out so far.

[27:48] Maribel Patiño

And I think to add to that, I think also my perspective of who can I mentor has also changed. So I think before I used to be more rigid on that where, “Well, if you're not molecular neuroscience wanting to do an MD-PhD program then maybe I'm not equipped to be a good mentor.” And that has changed a lot because now I understand that people have multiple mentors and in Colors of the Brain that's one of the things we do. Where they have a science mentor so someone might be more cognitive neuroscience or computational which isn’t my area of expertise. So maybe that's the type of research they want to do but maybe they're deciding whether they might want to do an MD-PhD or a PhD. And so I might be able to mentor them on that even though I might not necessarily be able to mentor them on their daily science work. So I think one thing that I think is really great about Colors of the Brain is that we have mentorship pods, where they have their primary science mentor and their primary PI mentor, but then they have a group of like three to five graduate student mentors that could be a mentor for a variety of reasons, whether that be career whether that be for just the daily questions of like what is science? How do I send emails? I think that changed my perspective a lot, and now I'm more open to just jumping on any mentorship pod, even though it might not be someone who's more systems neuro or molecular neuro, whereas before I was a little bit more hesitant, because I would be worried that I wouldn't be able to provide advice about their projects or their experiments. But I can always provide advice on like well how do you make a poster? how do you put your information on a poster to communicate the science? And I think that's something that I've also learned across the years.

[29:31] Christian Cazares

Yeah these kind of soft skills and how you teach them is something that I tell first-year undergrads. It's like that's something that you're already equipped to mentor somebody on. Sometimes people feel like I just started grad school, I don't have the skills yet. You applied to grad school. That's a huge skill in of itself. You presented somewhere. That's a huge skill in of itself. I think one of the reasons why we started Colors of the Brain as first-year grad students is because we recognized that just undergoing the application process was enough to be able to tell people what we've learned. I highly encourage grad students to view themselves as mentors.

[30:14] Maribel Patiño

You bring up such an excellent point. I'm so glad you brought it up before the conversation ended. And I think that's the idea that no matter what stage in your career you are in, you can always be both a mentor and a mentee. Like I would say I'm quite into my career, I'm more than 10 years in by now, but I'm still a mentee. I'm still in residency. I need mentors. But at the same time I have quite a long history of being a mentor myself. And so the idea that you need to wait to get to a certain stage to be a mentor I think is just false. I think that's one of the things I try to tell grad students is, if you're a first-year grad student you're probably at the best place to be a mentor for undergraduates. You're closest to the application cycle. You know what it was like and what has changed. Whereas sometimes now when I try to mentor people about MD-PhD applications or PhD applications… I applied almost eight years ago so sometimes it feels like well I might not be the best person anymore. Actually a younger grad student might be better equipped to provide that type of mentorship and with the same idea it's if you're a senior undergraduate student you are probably in a position to mentor a first-year undergraduate student. How do you apply to summer research programs? How do you apply to things that can get you a research position? And we've actually seen that where we've had Colors of the Brain scholars that become seniors and then they're helping people apply to the summer research program. And of course we've also seen Colors of the Brain scholars that become leadership in the program when they become grad students. But I think it really just goes to show like you don't need to wait to step up and be a mentor if that's something you want to do. You have skills that can help certain types of scientists depending on the career stage they're in and I think that's just something that's really important to highlight.

[32:14] Maribel Patiño

So my plans for the future. I am currently a second-year in the psychiatry residency program here at UCSD. I’m about to start my protected research track through an NIMH grant to the UCSD program and after that I will hopefully be applying to transition grants to try to run an independent research lab that looks at the biological underpinnings of psychiatric disorders.

[32:48] Christian Cazares

Yeah and my hope after this postdoc is to go on the job market and hopefully open up my own lab at a research institution looking specifically at neurodevelopmental disorders spanning both clinical patient populations and preclinical models. Both animal models and neural tissue models of neurodevelopmental disorders. I really think that one of the main takeaways of this conversation is just recognizing that you can be a mentor at any career stage and that conversations need to be had early between mentees and mentors. So thank you guys again for joining us on the podcast today to talk a little bit about mentorship both our roles as mentees and our roles as mentors.

[33:39] Maribel Patiño

So thank you guys again for joining us on the podcast today to talk a little bit about mentorship both our roles as mentees and our roles as mentors.

[32:48] Christian Cazares

Thank you everybody for joining us.

[33:44] Outro

We hope this conversation inspired you as you navigate your own mentorship journey. This podcast is brought to you by Neuronline, SfN's home for learning and discussion where you can find a variety of additional professional development resources and opportunities to connect with other neuroscientists. Check out the link in the show notes to learn more. Think Alike? is produced by Amanda Kimball, Adam Katz, Cashen Almstead, Taylor Johnson, Emily O'Connor, Dominique Giles, and Marie Dussauze. Thanks for listening.