How Not to Be a Graduate Student Mentor

Mentoring graduate students has evolved: The traditional apprenticeship model, where graduate students spend days, nights and weekends pipetting liquids into test tubes or grading hundreds of papers while only getting paid for 25 percent of their hours, is no longer in fashion. Graduate students now expect mentoring to encompass career development, mental health support and a respect for their responsibilities outside academe. What you may have called “enforcing academic rigor” might now be perceived as “creating a hostile environment.”

But let’s be real: You need publications, funded grants and invited talks to maximize your chances for tenure, promotion and awards. Do you really have time to create equitable expectations and negotiate mutually acceptable work-life balance for your graduate students? We have a list of tips gleaned from our roles as graduate student mentors at research-intensive institutions that will allow you to focus on the most important person in the mentoring relationship—you!

1. Let doctoral students progress at their own pace.

Avoid setting up regular meetings. Instead, wait for your graduate student to let you know when they have a deliverable for you to review. When they do reach out, tell them you are too busy to meet. You don’t want to coddle them.

Or, even better, give your students unyielding deadlines—double down on this when the student has a critical deadline approaching. Modern students are unlikely to have outside responsibilities like families or paying jobs or mental health challenges. Hey, you didn’t get any flexibility from your mentor, and look how you turned out!

Once you receive a deliverable, take weeks or months to provide feedback. Then provide nonspecific feedback like “the discussion is too long,” with no guidance as to what needs to be cut. Alternatively, strike out 75 percent of the verbiage without even realizing that most of the deletions were of sentences you suggested adding in the prior draft.

2. Task your graduate students with creating individual development plans on their own.

Tell your graduate students it will be most useful if they write their own individual development plans without guidance or prior examples. There’s no need to let them know what they can expect from you as their mentor. (They call it individual for a reason!) For example, they will instinctively know, without you needing to utter a single word, that you, as their mentor, are expected to help them craft their CVs, identify letter writers for their grant applications and tap your own networks to help them in their career searches. The concept of mutual expectations is overrated. It is sufficient to simply say, “I have high expectations and demand scientific rigor.” Students learn best when they have to figure out what this means on their own.

2. 1. Completely ignore the IDP.

Extra credit for completely ignoring the IDP the student has carefully developed. Never mention it again. Re-evaluating these plans regularly is a waste of your valuable time.

3. Take credit for everything.

No matter how much work a graduate student has put into a research study, always list yourself as first author on the resulting manuscript. Do this even if the original idea for the study was theirs and they collected all the data, conducted every analysis and wrote the paper with minimal oversight. After all, you did the final editing.  And even if you didn’t, it was your grant that made the study possible. This is called “paying their dues,” and your students can apply this same mentoring model to their own students someday.

Similarly, dismiss anything that does not directly benefit you. For example, if they win an award for teaching, tell them it is a strong sign that they are not taking their research seriously and this will hurt them when they apply for postdoctoral positions.

On the flip side, any time one of your “successful” graduate students is mentioned in a conversation, immediately announce that you were the one who trained them. Continue to do this even after they become full professors and presidents of societies. 

4. Informal tasks don’t merit acknowledgment (or pay).

Don’t feel compelled to give graduate students credit for “informal” tasks like mentoring undergraduates in the laboratory. Similarly, if your graduate student teaches a class, it’s fine for the sponsoring faculty member to be the instructor of record. Graduate students certainly don’t need a formal mechanism to recognize their contributions. Similarly, have them review manuscripts and grant applications for you. Tell them you are using this as a critical training opportunity. Then use every word they write, verbatim, in your review. Never meet with them to discuss the review and give them no credit.

5. Graduate-level training should focus solely on training for the lab.

There is no need to help graduate students learn time management or organizational skills, or how to network, interview or negotiate. Meaningful opportunities for teaching during the doctoral graduate program should not be encouraged. Seminar speakers should only be drawn from people with strictly academic careers. Similarly, industry/nonprofit scientists should never be included on panels or, even worse, invited to serve on Ph.D. committees.

6. Build strong bonds by using graduate students as personal assistants.

Pet-sitting, childcare, landscaping and bartending at your swanky faculty party are all great opportunities for your graduate students to build a strong relationship with you, their mentor. Aren’t they always saying that they want to meet with you? If they balk at these tasks, remind them that this is their chance.

7. Don’t support student travel to present work at conferences.

Insist that your graduate student present their work at a national conference and then refuse to help them find mechanisms to pay for it. They can surely find creative ways to pay $1,500 for registration, flights, hotel room and incidentals like getting to eat. There is a new Michelin-star restaurant in the host city that you are dying to try and that tartine of baby condor isn’t going to pay for itself.

8. Pack thesis/dissertation committees with your friends.

Task your graduate students with forming their thesis and dissertation committees on their own and then reject all the faculty members they select. Instead, fill the committee with your academic friends, regardless of whether they have the appropriate expertise. After all, if you are going to spend your valuable time on this, you should get to hang out with people you like.

9. Remind graduate students how easy they have it and use shame as a training tool.

Regularly inform your graduate students of how easy their life is compared to when you were a student. You were paid $60/week, slept on the lab floor with bags of hazardous waste as a pillow and subsisted on expired rat chow and cookies left over from department seminars.

As one of your graduate students gets up from their seat to give a talk at a conference, lean over and whisper to them, “Don’t embarrass the department.” In lab meetings, publicly ridicule students who make mistakes, no matter how minor.  Extra points for playing students against each other and making it clear whom your current favorite is. This is called “setting high standards” and will serve them well when they go on to academic careers. 

10. Assume your graduate students want to be exactly like you and define your graduate students’ success by how well they carry on your legacy.

Model zero work-life balance by working relentlessly, constantly complaining about the difficulty of academia and regularly sharing the overwhelming stress you are under. Then be shocked and offended when your graduate students have no interest in following in your footsteps. Openly refer to former graduate students who went to nonacademic jobs as failures. Do not provide students with training in skills that are transferable to industry positions. There should be a stigma to veering off the academic path and going to the “dark side.”

NOTE: No graduate students were harmed in the making of this essay. Any resemblance to actual mentors is purely coincidental, and not because these practices are so widespread as to be cliché. For a nonsatirical view of potential ways to better mentor grad students, try this article for a start.