A female Ph.D. student’s cautionary tale and the need for peer mentorship

By Bárbara Cruvinel Santiago

In 2018, I moved to NYC to attend my Physics Ph.D. program at Columbia. Life was far from perfect due to personal and family issues, political turmoil in my home country, being away from my loved ones, and a much less than ideal new housing situation. After working for a year, however, I was looking forward to going back to school. Given my track record, getting my B.S. in Physics at Yale under a full-ride need-based scholarship, and working for a year at MIT’s Nobel-prize-winning LIGO lab, I thought I was up for the challenge, but grad school turned out to be different from anything I had ever encountered.

The benefits of being a mentor in academia

Yoda gets a nice benefit from his mentee.

Today's guest post is by Wen-fai Fong, a graduate student in the Harvard Astronomy Department. Wen-fai will be graduating with her PhD this coming Spring and she studies the galactic environments of gamma ray bursts (GRBs). Since arriving at Harvard, I have been very impressed with Wen-fai's leadership and initiative in establishing mentoring within the astronomy department. Her efforts include the establishment of a peer mentoring program similar to the program I benefitted from at Berkeley, and a new faculty-peer mentoring program. The programs were recently recognized and funded by Harvard University through a GSC grant. Given her experience over the years with mentoring, both as a mentor and mentee, I asked her to share her thoughts with the Women in Astronomy blog readers.

Lying on my couch on Thanksgiving Eve, nearly comatose from uncomfortable amounts of turkey sitting in my stomach, I flipped on the TV. To my delight, Star Wars: Return of the Jedi was playing. A few commercial breaks later and I was wide awake, weeping during the scene in which Yoda dies. This got me thinking: Yoda was such a fantastic mentor to Luke Skywalker, and Luke obviously went on to do great things. But what the heck did Yoda get out of it? I let these thoughts dangle in my mind as I dabbed my eyes, changed the channel and told myself to get a grip!

Many articles I’ve read concentrate on the benefits of being mentored. Indeed, these studies have contributed to the ubiquity of mentoring programs in working environments. From business schools to medical schools¹, from small start-ups to tech moguls like Google... even the U.S. military² recognizes the impact of mentoring on the mentees. But why should people want to be mentors, especially in the stereotypically emotionless world of science and academia? 

Posting of the Boston AAS Panel Discussion Video

In a previous post I provided a teaser of the information presented during our Boston AAS panel discussion on 'Transforming Cultural Norms: Mentoring and Networking Groups for Women and Minorities".

Thank you again to our panelists for their thoughtful responses. Our panelists were:

• Marcel Agueros -- astronomy faculty and Director of Columbia University's Bridge to PhD program in the Natural Sciences
• Ed Bertschinger -- Chair of the MIT Physics department and deeply involved in a number of mentoring, networking, and cultural change initiatives, member of the CSWA
• Kim Coble -- physics/astronomy faculty at Chicago State University, a minority serving institution in Chicago, deeply involved in mentoring and pipeline issues
• Meredith Danowski -- astronomy PhD student and co-founder of Boston University's women in STEM mentoring and networking program
• Jim Ulvestad -- NSF-AST director, head of astro2010 demographics study group, and former member of the CSWA

Below is the videotape we made of this special session (thank you BU graduate student!), split into 3 parts.

I strongly recommend viewing the higher quality version, posted here.

(This blog site only supports very small file sizes.)

-L. Trouille

Boston AAS: Panel Discussion on Transforming Cultural Norms...

Yesterday we held a panel discussion during the Boston AAS meeting entitled "Transforming Cultural Norms: Mentoring and Networking Groups for Women and Minorities". In order to more widely disseminate the ideas and resources shared during this discussion, I'm taking advantage of our blog conversations.

Thank you to all those who attended and contributed to the conversation. We were very pleased to see the mix of men and women in the audience, although there's definitely work to be done in engaging more senior men in these discussions.

In this first post, I'm providing our extended community the resources page distributed at the start of the disucssion. Please send me your comments for any additional resources that you'd like to see included. The final list will be published for posterity at the CSWA 'Resources' page.

My next post will provide the videotape we made of the discussion. As a teaser, I'll note that our discussion yesterday highlighted examples of concrete steps to take to enable sustainability, obstacles to be aware of, how to develop allies through making it clear the ways your program champions your institution's priorities, acknowledging the realities of needing to work within existing structures, and the limitations of our recent decadal survey with respect to accomplishing the goals of the 'State of the Profession' white papers.

Till that's posted, another big Thank You! to our panelists for their ongoing efforts to improve the culture and climate at their institutions and for their thoughtfulness in considering the questions we had composed prior to the session to help guide the discussion.

Our panelists were:

• Marcel Agueros -- astronomy faculty and Director of Columbia University's Bridge to PhD program in the Natural Sciences
• Ed Bertschinger -- Chair of the MIT Physics department and deeply involved in a number of mentoring, networking, and cultural change initiatives, member of the CSWA
• Kim Coble -- physics/astronomy faculty at Chicago State University, a minority serving institution in Chicago, deeply involved in mentoring and pipeline issues
• Meredith Danowski -- astronomy PhD student and co-founder of Boston University's women in STEM mentoring and networking program
• James Ulvestad -- NSF-AST director, head of astro2010 demographics study group, and former member of the CSWA

Keep in touch and tuned in to future blog posts containing additional resources and information with regards to this ongoing discussion.

MENTORING/CULTURAL CHANGE RESOURCES

Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy (CSWA)

• To subscribe to the weekly CSWA newsletter - http://lists.aas.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/aaswlis
• Website - http://www.aas.org/cswa/
• Blog - http://womeninastronomy.blogspot.com/
• STATUS semiannual publication - http://www.aas.org/cswa/STATUS.html
• Pasadena Recommendations - http://www.aas.org/cswa/pasadenarecs.html
• Articles, links, and other resources on the “two-body problem”, “work-life” balance, mentoring, sexual harassment, unconscious bias, and re-entering the work force after a career break - http://www.aas.org/cswa/resources.html
• Mentoring advice - http://www.aas.org/cswa/advice.html

Committee on the Status of Minorities in Astronomy (CSMA)

• Website - http://csma.aas.org/
• SPECTRUM biannual publication - http://csma.aas.org/spectrum.html
• Links to presentations from previous AAS sessions on mentoring - http://csma.aas.org/events.html
• Research on the benefits of diversity in higher education - http://csma.aas.org/issues.html
• Minority faculty recruitment, promotion, and tenure - http://csma.aas.org/issues.html
• Affirmative Action - http://csma.aas.org/issues.html

NSF ADVANCE grant program to recruit and retain women in STEM careers

• Website - http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=5383
• Portal to search for NSF ADVANCE websites relevant to your topic of interest - http://www.portal.advance.vt.edu/index.php/search

Miscellaneous

• NSF postdoctoral mentoring plan requirement - www.nsf.gov/eng/iip/sbir/Sample_Postdoc_Mentoring_Plan.doc
• National Postdoctoral Association, mentoring plan suggestions - http://www.nationalpostdoc.org/publications/mentoring-plans/mentoring-plan
• MIT Mentors & Postdocs Toolkit - http://web.mit.edu/mitpostdocs & in particular, http://web.mit.edu/mitpostdocs/PostdocWebDocs/Mentor%20toolkit%20w.%20intro-policy-mentor%20plan%20outline%203-2-11.docx
• Statistics on trends in the participation of women, minorities, and persons with disabilities in STEM - http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/women/
• ‘Decade of Lessons Learned’ article on models of success and barriers to success in STEM programs at 4 Minority Institutions -cmmap.colostate.edu/scienceEd/docs/WalterEtal.pdf
• Univ. of Washington’s ‘Faculty Retention Toolkit’ -- guide to chairs and deans to facilitate retention and advancement of women/minority faculty - http://www.engr.washington.edu/advance/resources/Retention/index.html
• Association for Women in Science mentoring resources - http://www.mass-awis.org/mentoring
• MentorNet - http://www.mentornet.net/

-L. Trouille

Peer Mentoring

I first encountered this term "Horizontal Mentoring" in the article "Horizontal Mentoring Alliances: Resonant Phenomena" that appeared last fall in the Gazette, published by the American Physical Society's CSWP. But the concept is not strange to me. In fact, I wrote about it a couple of years ago, when I referred to it as "Peer Mentoring."

In fact, I have been a part of a peer mentoring group myself for almost two years now. The four of us come from various fields of science and all of us have children, and when we started meeting, we were all postdocs. Although the Gazette article cited above talks about peer mentoring at the senior faculty level, I would argue that horizontal mentoring is valuable at any level. Since the time we started meeting, two of us have given birth with a third on the way, and 3 of the 4 of us have landed permanent positions. Simply based on those statistics, I'd say our group has been a huge success!

So how do you go about setting up a peer mentoring group? We loosely based ours on Every Other Thursday by Ellen Daniell, with a number of modifications that we either agreed to in advance or evolved naturally as we went along. From there, it's a matter of recruiting people who are willing to commit to regular meetings, maintain confidentiality, and contribute to group problem solving.

I was re-reading my earlier blog post and was particularly struck by my prescience:

While I think the idea of support groups for women in science is great, it only works if you live in a region with high PhD density. Daniell worked at Berkeley, where there are more universities per square foot than perhaps anywhere else in the country. What if you live in a big rectangular state and work in a department with only one woman?

Good question! Because that's exactly where I'll be this fall! However, I have to revise my earlier pessimism about maintaining a useful peer mentoring group at a distance, because of the success of the group highlighted in the Gazette article. I've also already made some connections with some terrific women in other science departments at my institution-to-be, so maybe we could even set up our own network.

My peer mentoring group recently threw a Women in Science Party, getting together as many women scientists we could think of in the area so we could network with each other and talk about forming more peer mentoring groups, because this is really too good an idea to keep to ourselves. I hope to replicate the event at my new digs this fall and see if I can continue to spread the idea. After all, women scientists need mentoring even in big rectangular states.