A Two-Way Process Posted on November 30, 2007 Vishwajit Nimgaonkar (bio) talks about the mentor-mentee relationship.

Some of it is happenstance. Some of it is being persistent. I remember one particular mentor who was a very prominent geneticist. Extremely brilliant man, but he was not very interested in psychiatric genetics. And I had to keep knocking on his door several times.

And I think the break came when I gave him a videotape of a patient with schizophrenia. And he saw the tape and came back to me right away and said look, this is obviously a very interesting disorder. And he read about schizophrenia on his own and became very interested. And in fact is very interested in schizophrenia and genetics even now.

So it’s often a two-way process. I think you’re not usually just getting things from your mentor. I think it’s important to remember that the mentor also gets things from you. It’s important to keep that in mind so that it becomes fulfilling for your mentor as well.

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