In terms of working with mentees and students, initially, I found myself accepting any student and any interest that they had, just like I was mentored. I could go to a faculty member and say, "This is what I want to do."

And I was finding that that wasn't as much in my best interest and maybe not in the student's best interest, as well. And so I've evolved over time to focusing my energies in mentoring folks who share some interests with me, and I think as a result the student gets more of an expert than a generalist. And in turn I, as a faculty member and an investigator, get more collaborative efforts on the part of the student. As opposed to doing a hundred projects in a hundred different areas, we're focusing on two or three, and we have some commonality.

So I would encourage students to think about fit. When they're applying to graduate school, for example, it's not so much to be in the best program. What really works best, in my opinion, is to get the best mentor for what they want, and along those lines it's not just one mentor because it may work out, as was the case in my situation, it may work out that you may shift your interests or you may not get along well with a given mentor. So you want somebody to work, who shares your interests as a student going into a graduate program, but you also want a program that has more than one person that has that interest.