AAS | Events | 14-15 February 2008

Rachel Webster Rachel Webster obtained her PhD from Cambridge University in 1985. Her early research appointments were at the University of Toronto. Subsequently, she moved to the School of Physics at the University of Melbourne to start a new astrophysics group. Rachel has supervised over twenty PhD students in the past decade, with most continuing in research and academic positions. She is an active researcher and teacher holding numerous leadership positions within the Australian and international astrophysics communities. She has research interests in a broad range of topics in extragalactic astronomy and cosmology.

Writing this talk has been quite a challenge for me. The topic I was given was the 'best' mentoring, so the first thing I did – as I am sure most of our students do these days – was to rush to Google, to see what Google could tell me. And I got almost nothing. So what this talk has encouraged me to do is to formalise my own practices and put them into a coherent framework which, hopefully, will highlight some of the issues that we should touch on.

I do think that this highlights one of the key aspects of mentoring, which I am sure will come up in discussions today: that it is a personal journey. As you move into a mentoring role – and some of you, I know, would already have done that – it is a personal thing that you put together in some way or other.

This process, for me, has been helped by the proactive processes and procedures that have been developed at the University of Melbourne over the past decade or so by the School of Graduate Studies, now called the School of Graduate Research. And since graduate training has been of great importance to me, I have been active in all aspects of policy development, formal mentoring processes, scholarship awards and so on, at Melbourne.

What this has convinced me of is that excellent outcomes in research training are not accidental but the result of careful and consistent practices and planning. And, of course, excellent outcomes benefit all the sides of the equation: the mentor, the mentee and, more broadly, the institution that those people sit in. So it is an absolute win-win situation all round, if you can get this right.

Before I go on, because it is somewhat of a personal dialogue I want to introduce a couple of aspects of my own experience, just to put it in context.

As Philip said, I am an astronomer. I completed all my graduate training in the UK, and subsequently all my early postdoctoral positions were at the University of Toronto, in Canada. From there I was headhunted to a position as the first astronomer in the School of Physics at the University of Melbourne.

Now, while it wasn't true for everyone who was in my cohort at Cambridge, my supervisor there was from the sink-or-swim school. You'll probably hear a bit more about the sink-or-swim school: if you survive, you have probably got quite a lot of the qualities that ultimately will serve you well. I was very passionate about the science, and I think that was the thing that provided the bridge for me in the place of mentoring. But it also started me thinking very hard about how the process worked, and what the most desirable elements in a mentoring relationship should be.

The next stage in my career was as part of a vibrant new institution, well supported and with inspirational leadership. That showed me a model of what can work and how it can work very, very well.

Finally I moved to a faculty position at Melbourne, at a time when really there was no-one else doing astronomy in the city of Melbourne. So that was a far, far cry, both from what I had been in at Cambridge and in Toronto, and also from what is currently going on in Melbourne.

There are three aspects of mentoring that I want to look at in this talk: the qualities that make a great mentor, the processes which develop and improve the mentoring relationship, and the goals of a mentor. Each is quite closely linked to the others.

I am going to start with the qualities. It seems to me that there are four qualities that provide an excellent foundation for strong mentoring.

The most important of these is a passion for science. This is the basis for inspiration, and nothing is more infectious in a research group or a lab. In the end, though, each individual will need passion if they truly want to continue to participate in research.

I have watched colleagues and students who have been caught up by the passion of those around them for a while, but then, when it gets tough – when they have got a tough personal decision to make – they choose a different route. You should never, though, count these as a failure of your guidance or of the process. Quite the contrary. Each has a different path, and the skills from one area of research training quite clearly transfer across to others. So heaven forbid that each of the people that we train would want to work in that area for the rest of their lives. They have great skills. We want to see them move on and apply those skills elsewhere.

The next quality required of the mentor, is to be able to empathise with each individual student or research fellow. They are all quite different and they come with a range of talents and skills, some of them quite unexpected. Sometimes by listening and observing you end up with a person taking quite a different journey from the initial one you might have mapped out. In particular, they may be nothing like you. Early discussions of mentoring have often revolved around male scientists giving support to young researchers because they were 'just like' them when they were at that same early stage in their careers. You can imagine that, had that been a requirement for me, I would have been completely stuffed. There was no-one who was quite like me – and there probably still isn't! But I am quite hopeful that our approach is much more sophisticated now than it was 20 or 30 years ago.

The third thing that I want to touch on is the choice of research projects, and that choice in an early career is quite crucial. The particular point that I want to make is that I believe students should be given the very best projects that they are capable of undertaking, even if it means giving away your best projects. I think this generosity will manifestly carry its own rewards; it will engender an openness that produces great science.

Over the last few days I have been listening to scientists in some areas expressing an insecurity and stress – this is perhaps a little more common in medically related areas – about having their ideas out in the open, with the possibility that somebody might pick up and run with them before they have published them and got credit for them. In astronomy it is actually quite different. We go to great pains to try and give our data away and make it freely available on the web, and encourage everybody to use it. This is quite an interesting dichotomy, which I can't propose an immediate or obvious solution for. But the one thing that I do want to emphasise is that I would argue very strongly for broad generosity of ideas as a fundamental premise for all research mentoring. I think this is what makes a research group develop and sing at the highest level.

The final quality that I want to mention is what I would call astute and strategic judgment. This is about finding the right people, matching them to the right project, finding the right support, providing the right opportunities. There is no point in bringing an individual into your team if they are going to upset everybody else in the team and slow down the progress of work. Usually I have found that these choices have been fairly successful in my own group, but there have been occasions when, in hindsight, I realise that the choice may not have been optimal.

In particular, I would like to emphasise – picking up on what Bob Williamson has said and, in fact, what Kurt Lambeck said earlier – that I don't believe that the route through to a research career is necessarily linear. Some of the most successful people in my group have come via quite circuitous routes. Part of the advice and the relationship that we have had has often been to figure out the steps back that they need to take in their training to get the grounding, so that when they move forward, they in fact move forward extraordinarily rapidly. That is because they come with a raft of other skills that the others don't have. And so there is no impediment to coming in by a different route.

Let's have a quick talk about process. The most valuable thing that we bring to the mentoring process, I think, is our own personal experience. It provides a starting point, but heaven help us if we stay there – it would be quite stultifying. I want to give you an example.

As I have told you already, my graduate and postdoctoral training was in two pre-eminent international astronomy institutions. Both of them had a dozen or more active, successful researchers covering every area of astrophysics. I always knew if I had a question on something, I could just rush down the corridor and somebody would tell me the answer. They would tell me exactly where to go, they would tell me the latest thing – it was very straightforward.

Then I moved to Melbourne, and I was on my own. So I very quickly decided, 'Right, that's it. I'm not going to have any graduate students, because I'm the only person here and it's just not good enough for the students to have just me to consult.' But, as you have probably gathered from what Philip Kuchel said, that was not to be. Within a year I had tens of students knocking on my door, and I took them on. They all wanted to do astrophysics.

So then I was faced with the issue of how to provide them with an experience equivalent to the one that I had been blessed with at Cambridge and in Toronto. The ingredients for that were clear, and they included some of the following: at least one extended overseas visit for each student; attendance at every astronomy conference in Australia, because they are cheap and I figured it was a way at least that the students could learn something about other things; several international conferences during the tenure of their PhD; co-supervisors, in nearly every case from outside of Melbourne, and active co-supervisors whom they spent time with and worked with on a specific project; and then an active program of colloquia and seminars locally. I think all of these themes are going to be picked up on by other people today.

So, although I started out at Melbourne saying, 'No postgraduate students,' we have for some time had one of the most active postgraduate student populations in Australia. It was a failure on my part to take them on, but I think they have been remarkably successful.

The second important part in this process is reflection. This is a continual process. As a researcher all of us mature, we change roles – you have heard Bob tell you he has changed roles three or four times. As you change roles your interactions with your students and your research fellows change as well. And so this reflective process is an ongoing thing. You can use models from other people to provide some guidance, but in the end you are putting together your own story.

My research group still employs most of those early principles that I worked out in the first year, and although the experience for each student is not equal, we try to have equity amongst the students. That is a very important principle for us.

Opportunities for students are clearly very important, and as a small group what we can't offer in academic breadth we can offer in other ways. In particular, what we try to do is to provide very generous support, financially and also socially and personally, to each of the students so that we give them a good foundation for their career.

I should also say that we try and adopt what I call the Harvard model. Bryan Gaensler will probably tell me if I have got this wrong, but my understanding is that at Harvard, if you are good enough to get in, you are good enough to graduate. In our view, if you're good enough to get into our group we expect you to graduate, and we have essentially 100 per cent graduation out of our PhD program.

Just another comment on opportunities: every now and again – in fact, more often than we might expect – we get a brilliant student come through and it really becomes clear that we are going to limit them if they stay with us for three years. I have had a number of these; one in particular, at the end of his first year, had essentially finished the work for 13 papers. I thought he would be somewhat hobbled, remaining in Melbourne. We were fortunate enough to find him a visiting place at Princeton for the next 2½ years, and I don't need to say that that experience really took him into the international arena. It gave him an experience that we certainly could not have provided at Melbourne. I think it is important to realise when those things occur, and to find the right directions for people.

The final thing I am going to mention in regard to process is conversations. This may sound quirky, although it is probably just describing what a lot of people do. It is really the key to mentoring: it is talking to people. There are a range of different sorts of conversations that you need to have and which will be important in the development of a student or a research fellow.

There are the conversations about expectations, and how you should do things. I am not going to say much about that because I think it is reasonably straightforward, but they do need to happen – in particular, as has become apparent to us in recent times, the conversation about plagiarism. With new access to electronic media and to the web, suddenly the students are quite unclear about what constitutes plagiarism, for example just pulling material off the web, and how they should acknowledge it. Whereas, in the past, when you could not do that and you had to write it all out by hand, it became quite clear when you were pinching somebody else's words. That is a new issue that has arisen more recently.

The personal conversations are more difficult. For myself, I don't feel comfortable enjoying a close personal friendship with my graduate students, as I find that my role in some circumstances would be compromised by the friendship. However, as students have progressed beyond that stage I have been fortunate to develop good friends from amongst the group of students that I have supervised. Close relationships, either in affection or in enmity, can create havoc in a small group, even down to a simple thing such as embarrassing displays of affection in a shared office. Some of my graduate students have been irritated by such displays, to the point where they came and talked to me and we had to try and resolve it. So something as simple as that can create problems.

The other thing I would like to mention under this point is international students who come here without familial links. Sometimes quite simple or possibly complex problems arise and really you are the only person there for them. I had one graduate student who thought he might have a life-threatening disease and was completely immobilised for several months before he talked to me. Then we were able to talk and get some additional help and counselling for him to work through the issues. I should say that he scaled great heights thereafter. But you have to be aware and be able to deal with these potential problems.

The final set of conversations are what I call the difficult conversations. These are the ones that you don't like to have. You have to think very hard about whether or not to have them, and if you don't have them, what impact it will have on someone. I will give you an example.

Suppose you want to tell someone that you can't write them a strong reference for a job, and it is a job they have really got their heart set on. How do you do that? How do you plot the line between honesty and sensitivity? In this, the easy thing to say is, 'Oh well, I'm just not going to tell them. I don't want to say, “Look, you haven't got a hope in Hades of getting this job, and I really can't write you a decent reference.”' But if you don't do that, then are you giving them the opportunity to plot their best course through their career, without that information?

I firmly believe in being up front, and I have sometimes made myself unpopular with some of my research fellows – not so much my students, but my research fellows – by saying this. But I believe it gives them the opportunity, not only to ask somebody who may feel that they can write them a good reference, but also to reassess what their goals are and where they are going. And I will say, for all the angst that it has created at the time, the decisions that they have subsequently made have been superb. That reinforces my belief that it should be done. I have, in my advertised jobs, got references from other people that have been shocking. I find myself getting really angry when I get a bad reference, because I think it is an unfair thing to do to somebody that you are mentoring.

Finally I am going to touch on clear goals. I think that as a mentor, particularly in difficult situations, if you have clear goals and you understand what it is that you are trying to achieve, then you can make the right decisions and plan your way through what needs to be done.

The first goal is to communicate a passion – in my case it is about the Universe and our place in it. And this is not just in the research forum but also in teaching and in going out and talking to the general public. I actually think that formal teaching makes you think very hard about every aspect of your discipline, and its value can't be underestimated, so it is certainly not something that I shirk.

The second is producing world-class science. There is no excuse for aiming low, and I think that is just the bottom line.

The third is providing a high level of technical training. It might be problem solving, grant writing, oral presentations, computing skills – not only is all of this invaluable professionally but it also provides a solid base to launch a career in a broad range of different areas. These are all transferable skills. You can imagine that astronomers don't always get employed as astronomers, but hey, everybody else wants them because they're great on a computer, they can solve difficult problems, usually they can speak very well, and so on.

The final thing is to foster a collegial and supportive community of scholars. My view in this is that the whole should be greater than the sum of the parts. What we want to do is to ensure that people are having maximally productive and constructive interactions, and this means leading by example and also providing the appropriate opportunities. In my group we have both observers and theoreticians, and one example is that when the kids go observing I don't like to send someone in a car to drive 1000 km, observe for three nights and then drive home by themselves. So we always send at least two people, if not three. The theoreticians have to go as well. This is part of what they do for the group, for their colleague, and it is quite a bonding experience.

I have also found that sugar is a powerful social adhesive. So in all the groups that I have worked in, we have an organised cake on a regular afternoon every week and that provides a break from normal routines and an opportunity to see a different dimension of your colleagues. One of my past students made absolutely awesome tiramisus, and they are still quite famous within the group. And, of course, all major events should be celebrated, either at the pub or more conspicuously. These are just quite straightforward things that make a difference in a group.

I want to conclude with two very brief observations. First, lest you think that all of this seems very difficult and time-consuming: it is. But you get much more from it than you put in, so I can only highly commend it.

Secondly, I just wanted to say – and Bob has already beaten me here on this – that much of the discussion over the next few days will focus on mentoring between the wise and the less experienced, but I strongly believe that this process can be of just as great a benefit between peers or even in reverse, and that you should not hesitate to take those opportunities when they present themselves, because all of us need that guidance.

Discussion

Philip Kuchel: That was wonderful, Rachel – lots of resonances for me.

Question: I was just wondering if I could come and work in your group, please!

Rachel Webster: You like cake?

Question (cont.): I want to pick up on the point that Bob also made about mentors being mentored as well. I was wondering how, in your experience, that process starts and whether you think that there are the opportunities for people who are already heads of groups or in supervisory roles to actually get that mentoring themselves and work toward some of the things that you were talking about.

Rachel Webster: Well, Bob and I had a very short conversation about this just before we started today, and I think we basically agreed that there isn't much of this, actually, at the moment, so that the opportunities are not huge. There are isolated circumstances, I think, where there is some mentoring, but in my own department the senior staff are not mentored at all. In fact, the head struggles to mentor the junior staff. Some of us are taking a more proactive role in that now, because mentoring makes a difference. So if we work with our colleagues then we really do achieve much more. But it is a very new notion, and I don't actually know of anywhere where the wheels have been set in motion in a really positive way.

I can see that Bob wants to say something on this.

Bob Williamson: I just want to say that, although it wasn't totally successful, at the Murdoch when we had the mentoring program introduced six or seven years ago it was available to everyone, and roughly half of the senior staff (that is, professorial and above) took advantage of it. So there were people who took advantage of mentoring – particularly, I must say, the younger ones within the system, not the more senior ones.

It is very difficult to get people to accept that they can learn from a mentor who is junior to them, but you can. There is no question at all in my mind that Rachel is absolutely right: a mentor doesn't have to be someone senior. It just has to be someone who is sensitive to the issues and the problems. And often when you are mentoring, as you [the questioner] know, because you do mentoring, you are really just doing a sort of system where you are helping people to talk to 'someone' to work out their own way through things. No-one who you mentor wants to know your way through things; they want to know their way through things.

Anyway, we did it to some extent at the Murdoch and it is possible, but it didn't quite succeed. There were a few people there who resisted like mad, as you can guess.

Philip Kuchel: Actually, the wonderful thing about academic and research life is the new things that arise all the time. I derive great pleasure from seeing my own students effectively mentoring each other and helping each other not only with experiments but with planning things, quite outside my sphere of influence.

Question (Alan Lawson): I would just like to underline the things you both have just been saying about the informal nature of mentoring. Bob, I noticed that you said earlier that the worst possible thing that could come out of this is a bureaucracy of mentorship. When I have reflected on my own career, I am not sure that I ever actually had a Mentor (with a capital M); certainly nobody was ever designated to mentor me at any stage of my career. But I have learned from dozens and dozens of people. And the point you make about being able to consider somebody more junior or younger or in a different part of the institution is profoundly important, I think. You derive skills from watching other people at work. Some of it is just by observing modelling of behaviour, some of it is by actually talking about experience, and some of it is by actually attending workshops. But mostly, in my experience, it has not been from any sort of a formal mentor program at all but is about being open to that range of experiences and that range of training and that range of skills acquisition, by just being a sponge.

Philip Kuchel: It's like recognising opportunities. That great social scientist Woody Allen said, 'When you come to a fork in the road, take it!'

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