Mentors, Goals, and Early Publications Posted on December 3, 2007 Gary S. Sachs (bio) recommends making mistakes early in your career, as they offer valuable lessons.

I think the advice for somebody early in their career, particularly now where funding is tight, is to start by choosing more than one mentor, and start by asking your mentors very specifically to help you reach a defined goal. That you want their advice, not just to be friendly and meet with you every week or two weeks or every month, but you’re asking them to help you get from point A to point B, where you are now to where you know you want to be now.

Of course, you can change your mind about that. But give the mentors a clue about what you’re looking for. And instead of meeting and having an undifferentiated chat week in and week out, see if you can define some specific goals, short-term goals.

When I start with mentees now, what I tell them I would like from them is a plan that at the end of one year they will produce two papers and apply for one grant. They don’t have to get it. I just want to know that at the end of the year they’ve gotten two papers out and they’ve actually gone through the application process. Not necessary to get the grant, but to get the skills down how you get an application out. I think that’s really important. To make sure that you’ve gotten those couple papers written early on in the process and get mentoring to do it.

You will find that if your project takes three to five years to do and you haven’t gotten early product out the door and published, that that’s a much bigger challenge, and sometimes mistakes that you might make in these early preliminary projects are very valuable lessons that save you from making that mistake at the end that will cost you success in the big long-term project.

So I think start out, specific goals, more than one mentor so you can realize that there’s not just one way to do it, and make sure that you’ve got a defined goal with an early product like a publication or an application for funding.

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