In 2017, I was a research assistant professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and offered my first opportunity to mentor someone while on this job.
During graduate school, I mentored two students, separately, in two different years. The first mentee had ideas, ingenuity, and a fascination with everything – what is this conductive tape made of? (Tape that we were using to hold samples in place in a specific type of microscope that required conductive tape.) Are there carbon nanotubes in it? Can we look at that under the microscope too? This person also took two weeks off and informed no one.
I accommodated and tried to be their friend. Yes, fascinating tape, let’s look at it while we’re here. It’s OK, just tell us next time you want to take two weeks off, so we know you’re safe. Yes, thank you for inviting me to your theater performance; of course I’ll be there.
The good news is that that they designed a much-needed custom addition to our microscope that allowed us to make fine, controlled changes to the position of the sample on the microscope – we were looking at one nanoparticle at a time after all. This design would allow you to put the one you wanted front and center, not the one next to it. The bad news is that this is all that person contributed in a time span when we could have done much more.
For the second mentee, I gave them a project that wasn’t part of my main project. I didn’t expect success, so I choose something that I would be OK with if it didn’t succeed. Turns out, I didn’t care enough about that direction to think about the problem deeply. I hoped that they would think about it so I could think about something else. We got along great at a personal level, both of us willing to take the 2 am time slot in the cleanroom when needed. Without intellectual investment though, the collaboration yielded nothing.
Neither of them published a paper with me, and we didn’t keep in touch after we parted ways.
As a postdoc, I tried to mentor everyone who showed interest in what I was doing. Something hard to do (because the material was soft). Practical people wouldn’t touch it. Interested people would think about it. There were so many questions. Fearing to repeat the unproductiveness of the past, I focused on the technical, with little time for the philosophical or the personal, planning everything out step by step and delegating it. I had a steely grip on the directions and flow of the experiments. So many experiments. So many different experiments.
Eventually, we did make a paper out of it, but not before I apologized in a private conversation to each individual who spent time and effort being confused or doing something with a purpose they didn’t understand under my directive, and who didn’t get the help that they needed because I either 1) also did not understand the purpose 2) was unable to articulate it or 3) was unwilling to spend the time to both get more clear on the purpose and how to communicate it.
In case you’re curious, here’s the one paper that came out of that. It is pretty cool that we found a way to visualize otherwise invisible, atomically thin gold.
So when I was offered the opportunity to mentor a visiting German student here in Hong Kong, this past anguish came rolling back. I wanted to try again and said yes. Weeks before she arrived, I sat on my bedsheets decorated with sheep and still could not go to sleep. I thought, how would I not f--- this up again?
I called my dad, a life-long research scientist of multiple postdocs who retired during the post-2008 recession after more than a decade in pharmaceuticals. As a high schooler, I remember meeting his happy summer interns at end-of-summer barbecues. After he retired, he continued to teach and tutor in a community college and raise the success rate of a program that helps students who are at risk of dropping out of high school.
What did he do right?
I don’t remember the details of that conversation sitting on my sheep sheets. I remember one line, spoken gently and informatively - “Just remember, you’re connecting with another person.”
That summer, I learned that her favorite animal was the sheep. I learned that she loved to swim, hike and drink beer, play piano, learn Cantonese, and had never used a land-line phone (until I taught her how to call the campus swimming pool to find out if they had reopened after a thunderstorm).
She cared about the project as much as I did, or vice versa. When we got stuck we would brainstorm over cheesecake and hazelnut coffee at the campus McDonald’s (that has awful fries).
I let us think together and I let us think differently. By definition, research is hard because you are trying to find out something that has never been done before. Why would one thinker be better than two? Why would one way of thinking be better than two? I didn’t get defensive when she pointed out blind spots in my thinking, and when her blind spots showed they were opportunities for me to practice articulating something meaningful and clearly.
When she left Hong Kong, I mailed her the new sheet decorated with sheep that she had no luggage space for.
Our work together laid the foundation for the project that, over the following three years, became a detailed and practical evaluation of a classic molecular biology technique. Three more undergraduates worked with me on it, each of them contributing something different from their unique strengths, all of them exceeding expectations, all of them teaching me something new. By the time our paper was rejected by the first journal we submitted it to, three of us no longer worked at HKUST, (two of us and the professor remained). By the time it was rejected from the fourth journal we submitted it to (unfairly, we felt, after all those revisions), none of us worked at HKUST anymore (just the professor). That didn’t seem to change anyone’s willingness to invest the time and mental energy to dissect and then retell the story in a better way for the next journal we submitted it to.
Yes, the professor we all worked with still at UST was still pushing the project, so it was going to get done, but it’s a situation where everything could have fell to me as the project leader. It didn’t though. The collaboration continued across three continents until it was published in the fifth journal we submitted it to.
More than a year since I left HKUST, I know where they go to school or work now, I know the names of their partners and their pets if they tell me, including a hamster named Nameless.
Happy Father’s Day, Dad! Thank you for reminding us that everyone, scientists included, is human first.