Maximize your mentorship search and secure - Neha Batra

This resource first appeared in issue #60 on 05 Feb 2021 and has tags Managing Your Career: Other

Maximize your mentorship: search and secure - Neha Batra

I don’t think it’s controversial to suggest that as research computing managers we are given precious little guidance, or useful advice. If we want those things, we have to seek them out ourselves.

Like with putting together a solid list of job requirements, the steps for finding and recruiting mentors to give us some advice aren’t surprising or challenging - there’s no “One Weird Trick for Getting Mentorship”. You just have to figure out what you’re looking for, who you’d like to talk to, and approach them seeking some advice.

People, even busy people, are generally pretty open to having occasional short conversations with and giving advice to people who are earlier in their career path and have questions. And in other contexts, we know this - those of us trained in academia generally wouldn’t think twice about contacting a more senior author on a paper we were interested in, or a colloquium speaker, to ask some questions about how they did the science. But we’re so weirdly conditioned around management not being real valid work in academia that we’re pretty reticent to approach people seeking advice on those topics.

Batra goes through the steps of figuring out where you want mentorship, prioritizing potential mentors, an initial ask for a discussion, and asking for another conversation in a couple months.