Don’t just pick a project, pick a person. Here are the 6 traits of a research mentor who will accelerate your career.

I have seen many brilliant research students who were very enthusiastic at the start of their research journey, be it an industry data scientist, or a student on their MS or PhD journey, but as the years progressed, they lost interest, no longer enjoyed the process, and stressed out over the paper deadline.

This, I feel, is a tremendous waste of talent and potential.

There may be various reasons behind it. There may be many factors to blame. Mentorship is one such vital part of your research journey. It determines how pleasant or satisfying your learning journey as a researcher is. We typically focus only on the end product, i.e., a publication, and chase deadlines after deadlines.

Ultimately, you own your research journey or PhD. The initiative to make it a great experience must come from you, the mentee.

This article is written to increase the awareness of researchers, both academia and industry, who are:

1. Searching for a research mentor
2. Mentoring young researchers

I truly believe it will be beneficial for both the mentor and mentee.

The mentee will benefit from an exciting, inspirational learning journey as a researcher. This will increase his/her interest in the subject and have a positive and engaging experience out of the internship or a long-term research project.

The mentor will benefit from better work productivity, having independent researchers in the team to delegate important tasks, and not worry about micromanagement.

What I do not cover in this article

It is also important to select the right student or mentee for you. I will write a future article about it. In my personal experience, if you choose the wrong person to do some experiments for your research paper, it will cause serious delays or even ignore some great research ideas because the initial experiments failed.

Mentorship is one of the many soft skills you need to master or look out for. I have covered other soft skills that one should aim to master in another article.

10 Essential Soft Skills Every Grad Student Must Sharpen for Research Success

Before continuing, some background about me

I had many research mentors throughout my research journey, from my B.Tech college, to my MS and PhD journey at IIT Kharagpur, being a research associate at L3S Research Center, Germany, and internships at Adobe India and GE Healthcare, Bangalore.

Similarly, I am grateful to have the opportunity to mentor brilliant students, right from my coding club in my B.Tech college, to mentor B.Tech and M.Tech theses from IIT Kharagpur, along with numerous course projects. Currently, I am mentoring PhD students from both India and Germany.

Therefore, I am hopeful that my learnings from close to nine years of research experience will help you select the right research mentor for you.

How to Choose the Right Research Mentor

I will cover some traits and best practices for selecting or being the right mentor in your research journey. It will cover the positive aspects as well as red flags to be aware of.

Although the research journey is a learning experience, you should do your due diligence before accepting mentorship. It will make a huge difference.

This is because it will take some time to find out:

1. As the results are not immediate
2. You are still learning and new to research
3. You need to trust the learning process and give some time, as the mentor has your best interests in mind.

Therefore, I repeat, please do your due diligence before selecting a research mentor. As it takes a lot of effort to change it down the line.

Here are a few non-negotiable due diligence steps

1. Talk with past mentees or students, if possible, in a casual or informal setting. This is the best way. However, remember, they may not tell you the big picture or the negative aspects, so plan your interaction.
2. Placement statistics of past mentees: This is a more objective metric. It will give you some idea about the quality of mentorship, academic and industry connections of your mentor.
3. If you are satisfied with the above steps and you are lucky enough to have some time to experiment, please join a short-term research project (internship or helping a research scholar under a mentor with some experiments) with the mentor. Working with him/her will give a lot more insights and help you decide if it is a perfect fit for you.

Once you have done your research, it is time to evaluate the person and see whether they are a perfect fit for you. Please look for these six essential traits during your interactions (in no particular order):

1. Teaching Mindset
2. Transparency
3. Consistency
4. Flexibility and Actively Hearing your Opinions
5. Visibility
6. Psychological Safety

Teaching Mindset

In the initial few interactions, you should try to understand the worldview of the mentor, i.e., what he/she prioritizes. I have broken it down into simpler questions. Remember, the idea is to find the best fit for you:

• Process versus outcome: How ambitious are the goals: top-tier conferences of the field or a fixed set of known conferences? Is the research problem more important, or just making something reasonably good to meet the next paper deadline?
• Involvement with the project: Actively involved with great feedback or meeting weekly in a periodic manner to just wanting updates and why the progress is not fast enough.
• Constructive feedback: Is the feedback general and cursory, or is it constructive with actionable insights and possible solutions?

A Self-help guide to starting your own Machine Learning research project

Transparent Communication

This is an underrated skill, but it is a blessing for the mentee.

• Actively create a healthy environment: This allows the mentee/student the space to voice his/her opinions. It can be something simple, like What do you think of this approach? Do you think this will work?
• Be direct and set work expectations: Do you already have a plan, or do you want the student to take the lead? If you do not like the mentee’s idea, say it directly, but also explain your reasoning for it.
• Do not expect the mentee or student to read between the lines.
• Mention both the strengths and weaknesses: This feedback helps the mentee to understand their mistakes so that they can learn from them.

Consistency

• Allocate specific time for each student: Based on your schedule and project requirements, you can schedule a periodic meeting once every week or two weeks.
• Respond within a day: Everyone is busy with their life, but I think it is professional to reply within a few hours during office hours.
• Allocate more time before paper/project deadlines: It is reasonable to expect the student to spend more time before the deadline, but great mentors make extra time. This makes the student more valued and motivated to go the extra mile.

Flexibility and Actively Hearing your Opinions

• Set priorities: Some deadlines or project requirements are non-negotiable; communicate these items early. But if that is not the case, allow changes or delays.
• Saying everything is urgent and needs to be done in a day is not a good practice. But, understandably, we may forget and need some urgent actions. It is okay if it’s a one-off, but it should not be the norm.
• Watch how the mentor reacts when you criticize or say you do not like their approach; the reaction will say it all. A good mentor does not take feedback personally but will encourage you to share the thinking process and discuss it.
• Mentors are good at knowing when you have really thought about an idea, so be well-prepared. This also means the student should have planned ahead and thought of a solution in detail.

Visibility

• Is the mentor providing opportunities to present your work or giving you different learning opportunities? Like mentioning your work in the invited talks, or letting you write research grant proposals
• When you get a paper accepted, who attends the conference to present the paper? How is the ordering of authors in a publication decided, merit-wise or biased?
• Is your mentor supportive of you pursuing internships? Will he/she provide you a letter of recommendation for applying for postdocs, PhD, or an industry position, provided you have a significant research contribution (like submitting a paper together)?

Psychological Safety

• This is a result of a good mentorship and is hard to define. It allows the student to take risks, pursue bold ideas, and take initiative. Otherwise, the mentee tries to remain within the project or does not feel the need or motivation to think out of the box
• This creates a sense of ownership. When mentees feel they have a say in a project’s direction, they become more invested and proactive. Realistically, this should be allowed at a more advanced stage when the mentee has demonstrated good performance consistently. This is not a right, but something that the student/mentee must earn through their work.
• How does the mentor react when a paper gets rejected? Does he/she share the blame and take responsibility, and engage in active discussion to discuss the next actionable steps?
• Rejection is part of the process; it is important to learn from the mistakes and not repeat them.

Final Words

In this article, we cover some of the traits to look for in a research mentor. I also cover some due diligence strategies to evaluate your research mentor at a more personal level.

Although we may believe we do not have choices, it will be liberating to know that just taking a step back and embracing the unknown is enough to avoid committing too early by exploring all options.

Therefore, it is imperative to talk with others who are in the same situation. Reddit and Twitter are great platforms where users share their personal experiences.

If you like this article, you can find more such articles on my website.

Please do share how your experience has been and what traits you think is most important. I would love to hear what you think.