How Do I Find a Mentor?

00:00:05.000 | Our first question comes from Lena, who says, "What would you recommend to those

00:00:10.680 | who don't have a mentor? You mentioned a couple of times the necessity to have a

00:00:16.260 | mentor, especially in an academic career, but I'm very unfortunate in this regard.

00:00:21.120 | My PhD supervisor is far from being a star in his field and has very poor

00:00:26.680 | supervising skills." Well, Lena, usually what I advise is that if you don't have

00:00:32.440 | a good mentor, get a good peer group. I mean, actually, this is quite common. This

00:00:38.120 | was, for example, relatively standard in the theory group at MIT where I was

00:00:44.240 | doing my doctoral training. It was very peer group focused, so you would

00:00:49.400 | assemble a collection of collaborators of fellow graduate students and postdocs,

00:00:55.080 | and you would work with them to come up with ideas and create new research

00:00:59.580 | directions. Now, I think this was common, in particular in the theory group, because

00:01:03.880 | A, the type of work we did was such that you didn't need, for example, a really

00:01:08.920 | well-funded physical laboratory. You weren't tied to a grant in the way you

00:01:13.160 | might be if you worked in a biology lab where it says, "Look, we hired you to do

00:01:17.040 | these assays, and we need you to do these assays." It was a lot more flexible when

00:01:21.200 | you're doing mathematics, but also these professors in that department were very

00:01:24.720 | famous, and they had famous people things to do. These were really big-name

00:01:30.040 | scholars. There was multiple Turing Award winners. There was multiple Genius Grant

00:01:34.800 | Award winners. They often had large research groups, and so there was just a

00:01:39.680 | real culture of come up with an almost entrepreneurial startup-like collection

00:01:46.560 | of peers to work with. And in fact, a lot of my work was done that way. I did a lot

00:01:50.560 | of good work with my advisor as well, but I did a lot of work with these peers,

00:01:53.240 | many of whom I still collaborate with today. So Lena, this is a known model, and

00:01:56.680 | it's what I'm going to suggest to you. Find other researchers who are doctoral

00:02:01.440 | students or postdocs that you like, that are interesting, that are working on

00:02:05.680 | interesting things, and start working on interesting things with them. I think you

00:02:09.120 | can learn quite a lot that way. I know you mentioned your question that I

00:02:12.360 | advise always getting a mentor in academia. That's not actually something I

00:02:15.960 | advise. I think it's fine, but I don't think it's a necessary condition for

00:02:21.560 | success. So look for the people around you you can control. Make them as good as