As I was graduating high school, everyone – whether it was friends, teachers, or family – told me I had to find a good mentor. I didn’t really know what this meant in the context of college. I had experienced instructive relationships with coaches and teachers before, but I didn’t really know how that would translate into a research-driven environment.
Now as a sophomore, I understand that especially before declaring a major, it can be challenging to forge mentorship connections. Still, during the first two years of my undergraduate experience, I have encountered mentorship in a variety of ways that I would have never expected. Whether it was through my lab-based courses, an internship, or even a recent serendipitous moment, quality mentorship has been a defining part of my Princeton experience.
The simplest path to finding a mentor is to target your area of research. This is especially true if there’s a project or idea you have in the works. With this style of selective mentor search, it’s important to prioritize synchronous methods rather than perfect topic alignment with the interests of your mentor. This can help prevent you from partnering with a mentor whose focus might be in textual analysis rather than in statistical modeling. While partnering in this overlapping way can be very exciting (as Natural Sciences Correspondent Angel Toasakul shared earlier this year), as someone who hadn’t pinpointed research interests initially, this route wasn’t the most viable option for me.
Another common path is simply working with anyone available in a given department. In this context, mentorship is connected to providing a foundation in the practices and tools of the discipline. These connections often start through sophomore research courses like MOL 280. In fact, this path to mentorship is especially common in the physical sciences where engagement with hands-on lab-based skills are foundational to any independent work.
As I have worked through my Pre-Med classes, I have gained exposure to the fundamentals of chemical and biological lab work. Over the course of MOL 214, Introduction to Cellular and Molecular Biology, I connected specifically with my Lab TA. He shared his own journey as a former Pre-Med undergraduate turned Ph.D. candidate, and the twists and turns of his journey. He also invited us to reach out to certain faculty for insight on research opportunities based on our interests as we learned more about Molecular Biology during the course. Whether it was preparing for the MCAT, selecting graduate school programs, or figuring out which on-campus labs had availability, the mentorship he provided during those lab sessions was profoundly insightful.
Undeniably though, the most common route of encountering a mentor is through serendipity. Last summer, I encountered uniquely insightful mentorship working as an intern with EPIPHANY (Equity in the Prevention and Progression of Hypertension-a study seeking methods for lowering high blood pressure. The EPIPHANY team was sprawling with peer coaches, community leaders, and researchers spread throughout the state of Alabama. Within this expansive network, a part of me somewhat expected to receive brief task assignments without true direction. Instead, I received clear directions from the different members of the research team and the program manager about my role and responsibilities. I was always able to reach out to the team members on site about anything I was confused about. Looking back on the internship now, I see the guidance I received wasn’t limited to taking blood pressures in the field or running database quality assurance in the office. I gained new perspectives on life as a graduate student and navigating career planning. These perspectives opened my eyes to the diverse pathways that can be available with an open mind.
Looking back now, I see that mentorship doesn’t just come from just the principal investigator or program lead. Mentorship comes from project managers and graduate students too. But in order for serendipity to matter, you have to be open to it. I carried this open-mindedness with me during this spring semester, when I had the opportunity to act as a mentor myself and speak to a writing seminar about how they can conceptualize their first research assignment at Princeton.
I vividly remember being a first-year and having previous students speak about their experiences in my writing seminar or in my freshman seminar. Finding myself in that full circle moment was astonishing – I found myself stepping into the role of a mentor for those students, even if it was only for a brief moment. I shared my experiences with research, in regards to both my writing seminar project as well as the research work I’ve conducted independently. Alongside my peers, I reminded the first-years that although time, focus, and the lack of a budget were all real constraints to starting research, keeping an open mind could transform those constraints into new directions and point them towards exciting questions.
As I start thinking about the exciting questions that lie ahead in my own future (for my Junior Paper and Senior Thesis in particular), I am grateful to know that I have had the privilege of excellent mentorship in the past, and I am thrilled by the opportunities to encounter new insights that await.
— Stanley Stoutamire Jr., Social Sciences Correspondent
