Building on Your Mentors' Advice Posted on October 16, 2007 Kiki D. Chang (bio) talks about using the advice from multiple mentors.

Obviously, having a good mentor and good mentor relationship, and being a mentor even is fantastic. I highly encourage it for all people who are looking into these kinds of fields and have questions about going into academics and how to succeed. But one thing I never heard about much was about — well, what was my style. And my style was never really to have just one mentor. And never to really take what that mentor said at face value — to believe everything that mentor said. Mostly because I thought again your own opinion is probably the most important. So, what I did was I accumulated very good mentors throughout my career but I also incorporated a little bit of what they had to say each person and built my own kinds of ideas and things like that. And took the best out if it. Because each person’s path is a little different, each person’s priorities a little different and so by blindly emulating a mentor is not the best way to do it either. And so to make, like you said, active choices based on the information you gather slowly, I think is probably the best way to do it. Mentors are good but you have to also know how to filter the information that you get from them in order to apply to your own situation.

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