Sample Questions to Ask Potential Mentors
Adapted from NIH - Questions for Potential Mentors
When meeting with potential mentors, you need to determine whether their research programs and mentoring philosophies match your own interests and needs. We've divided sample questions into categories. We recommend that you start with questions about the research program before addressing your potential role in the research group.
QUESTIONS ABOUT THE MENTOR AND HIS/HER RESEARCH PROGRAM:
- How often do you meet individually with your students and fellows?
- Does your research group have regular group meetings? If so, how frequently?
- What qualities do you value most in a student or fellow?
- What are your current research projects, and at what stage of completion are they right now?
- Do you allow students/fellows to design their own projects or do you prefer to assign projects?
- How often do you collaborate with other research groups?
- What process do you use to evaluate your students and fellows? How often does this occur?
- How many former students and fellows have you mentored, and where did they go after leaving your research group?
QUESTIONS ABOUT YOUR POTENTIAL ROLE IN THE RESEARCH GROUP:
- What might I be working on here?
- What technologies, approaches, and model systems would I have the opportunity to learn and develop?
- Would be I able to take courses or participate in training programs?
- Would I be able to attend scientific meetings? How often?
- Would I have opportunities to give formal and informal research presentations?
- Would I be working on my own project or sharing a project with other members of the research group?
- Is there a specific person in the group that I could go to with day-to-day questions about laboratory procedures and supplies?
ADDITIONAL QUESTIONS FOR ADVANCED TRAINEES:
- If I joined this group, would I have the opportunity to train or mentor junior members of the research group?
- Do you allow students and fellows to co-author review articles with you?
- Do you allow fellows to pursue independent projects to take with them to their own faculty positions?
- What would you expect of me if I disagreed with your interpretation of results or even the value of a research project?
Conversations to have with mentors
- How to discuss how you want to be trained.
- How to discuss planning of your career trajectory.
- Negotiating lab responsibilities.
- Guidance on writing, how to ask for help.
- Best practices in science professionalism.
- how to cite references in your presentation.
- how to reach out to collaborators or mentors.
- when to run things by your PI.
- What sort of academic productivity are you looking for? What kind of impact are you looking to produce? How many papers are you looking to produce?
- Do you have a specific project you want to work on?
- Work life balance: How do you approach work life balance? Asking about how they feel about working weekends tells you a lot about the mentor. + Do you have a project in mind for me? Or more of a general direction? Having a specific project is going to make it easier to be productive faster, but at the cost of your productivity?
- What did people in the lab do after they graduated? Did they produce academics? Or people that went into industry, clinic, ect?
- How does authorship get decided?
- Does writing the bulk of manuscript get you first? Do you have to generate the most figure panels? Avoid deciding this at the beginning.
- What happens if you finish someone else's project?
- How present is your mentor? Asking the question directly might not work. Try asking, “how many times a week/month do you expect to meet individually/as a group?”
Conversation Having Tactics:
- Rephrase your preferences in the language of a grant. Some mentors don’t respond well to an idea unless it can help get the next grant.
- Narcissism is common among academics.
- Can you make your PI think it was his idea?
- Drop the idea in journal clubs, lab meetings, so that it is normalized in other contexts.
- If you end up in catastrophic situations, have conversations by email to record conversations. Also just to remind PIs that they said stuff they said.
- Bigger vs smaller PIs?
- Different risk profiles.
- Big labs with great post docs can be good learning experiences even if you see your