Editorial A
Mentoring—One of the Most Important Acts
M
entoring is one of the most important activities of people who respect and care professionally for their colleagues. Mentoring is a prolonged—even lifetime—interaction, which involves teaching (a central component), professional advicegiving, and offering recommendations and criticism. Good mentoring challenges individuals to develop their intellectual skills to the highest levels and, thereby, has vast implications for a nation's success in science, technology, and business. Mentoring has, in recent years, become a popular topic for press articles, which are sometimes critical and often contain misconceptions. For this reason it is important that chemists understand the concent of mentoring themselves In this editorial I offer mv "two cents" in the hope of stirring thought and discussion Mentoring requires a contextual definition of mentor and mentoree. College and university professors serve as mentors; students are the usual mentoree (junior faculty are another important group). Mentoring of students takes place during three periods—undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctoral—the first two being the most formative years. Undergraduate research is a dramatically consequential stage of mentoring because the student, perhaps for the first time, is challenged to think for his or herself and carry out unstructured experimentation. Advising graduate student research is an intense form of mentoring and will have both a prolonged and decisive effect on student career directions. In these types of mentoring, the professor's tasks are to develop the student's knowledge base, capacity to self-instruct, and ability to think independently, be self-reliant, take initiative, and be creative. Accomplishing these tasks can be profoundly satisfying There are few better rewards than seeing a young person evolve from a "what now?" to a "look what I have invented" state! The life-long mutual Drofessional respect that develops from mentoring freauently leads to years of providing recommendations and advising I am reminded of local sto-
former players. I'm sure Dean would agree that professors act analogously as "coaches". The professor plays two other roles, concurrent with mentoring, which are often not understood. Academically, the professor acts as judge, as well as mentor, of the student's ability to develop; when this is lacking, some aspect of "failure" ensues. Failure is never easy to encounter; in my own experience I have always felt that a student's self-adjustment between goals and reality is more productive than professorial pronouncements. Another professorial responsibility in the research university is to create new chemical knowledge. This can be seen as pressure on students to succeed and is easy to trivialize as professorial ambition for glory, but I view it as an important real-world challenge to students to "Just do it". The mentoring role of industrial managers is vastly underestimated, in my opinion. Managers have a responsibility to develop their employees' skills, for their own sake and in their company's self-interest. I have seen numerous examples of entry-level industrial chemists blossoming under good managers who guide their employees into new learning situations, perceive their strengths and weaknesses, and pave the way for success and advancement. Managers also have the "judge" role and the opportunity to guide employees between goals and abilities. Industrial mentoring has a real-world impact quite analogous to that of educational institutions. I think that current industrial practices overemphasize short-term results and tend to negate the benefits of good managing Still it prospers in many companies Mentoring is an activity for those who care professionally about others. Not all those in a position to mentor nurture such cares, but I maintain that the vast majority do and that their sense of responsibility is one of the strengths of the chemical enterprise worldwide.
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