What Makes a Good Mentee Posted on January 2, 2008 Patricia Suppes (bio) encourages her mentees to discover and pursue their own interests.

What makes a good mentee? Well, I really feel it’s important that they know — I don’t want people doing what I think they should do. I’m not interested in that. I want someone to think through; I’ll give them some things to do, but in terms of a major commitment, I feel very strongly they need to know what their passion is because it’s too much work.

If you’re doing somebody else’s agenda, you’re going to get wrung out. You need to know what it is that you’re passionately interested in, because it’s probably going to be different for me. It could be similar, but it may be different.

So, for example, I have one mentee right now, he knew he wanted to work in bipolar, but he really wasn’t sure. We did a few things. But I didn’t sort of say here’s your agenda. So, he, over a period of time, thought it through, looked around, and he on his absolute own came up with the fact he’s really fascinated by clock genes and is now doing some of the most exciting translational research out there in bipolar disorder.

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