Print This PostWelcome. I’ve got my read with mother voice on because today we’re going to talk about isolation in academia and the importance of mentoring. I know I’ve talked about mentoring before but that was mostly from a ‘how to find one, what they’re for’ perspective. This is from a ‘why they’re really important for your mental health’ perspective.
This one is a little personal and runs off the back of a chat I had with a friend recently which needs some background. We’ve both worked for big, busy people in the past. Both taken on additional admin jobs we didn’t really care for but as part of that learned to do a lot of random things that will be useful to us in our ongoing careers. Both recently realised we’re in this alone and are finding it slightly terrifying.
The background to the chat went as follows; I had to write a review and had been doing nothing in particular about it, nor about the couple of papers I also have to write. The pandemic happened, I’m out of practice. This was the excuse my brain had conjured up to cover up the feelings of absolute inadequacy and terror. On this particular day I had opened a blank word document, pasted in the agreed title of the review and began to hash out sections. I started looking for papers and found some. Felt the ideas coming together, felt some degree of synthesis about what I was starting to write. Kept at it for forty minutes or so and felt relatively good about myself. There was absolutely nobody in my office who would care so I messaged my friend explaining that I wasn’t showing off or being childish, but I really had done something that I’d been really nervous about starting and was feeling quite proud.
The reply I got was a flood of relief. The friend could relate. They knew they could do stuff like write papers and write grants, they’d done plenty of it before, but now they were flying solo these tasks came with their own dollop of terror. They actually mattered for our futures. The prospect of not doing them well, and more importantly not knowing how to do them well, induced nausea and a contradictory consumption of excessive amounts of cake. Being independent felt a little like being pushed into the deep end on your first swimming lesson and whilst this can definitely result in some strong swimmers, it can also result in death by drowning.
92% of US Fortune 500 companies now offer mentoring programs, up from 84% in 2022.
Feelings of isolation have increased in academia in recent years. The first study I found on this has the awesome title ‘Isolation in Globalizing Academic Fields: A Collaborative Autoethnography of Early Career Researchers’ by Belkhir and colleagues. The abstract uses words like bricolage, polycentric governance and autoethnographic. It’s amazing. If you want the low down without the complex management speak then there’s a great piece in The Conversation that covers the basics, written by Olivier Sibai, one of the senior authors of the original article. One thing the authors highlight is the problems that a competitive workplace produces. They are particularly critical of the REF (the UK system of judging research institutions), noting that it results in an inherent performance pressure and that ‘Because of this pressure to perform, academics often feel obliged to disengage from potentially energising relationships with local colleagues and friends. This is because of a fear it may damage their productivity or prevent them from reaching their goals.’
But others have pointed out that this article is a relatively rare piece. Petar Jandric wrote an excellent piece entitled ‘Alone-Time and Loneliness in the Academia’. Not entirely sure why he called it the academia but it’s a great article in which he highlights that being alone and being lonely are not the same thing.
This is a very relatable feeling. I am firmly on the introvert end of the spectrum and actually find most of the population quite exhausting. I would much rather be in a small dark room with a book than at any kind of social gathering. And I definitely write better alone in my kitchen than in my office with random people popping in and out. But after weeks and weeks of not talking to any other grown ups about my science I can often find myself babbling to the first approachable and friendly professor I see. Rambling on and on incoherently about all the ideas in my head at the time, all my failings and faults. Everything comes out, and it’s then that it occurs to me that I might have been, possibly, maybe, perhaps a little bit lonely.
And this isolation can translate into poor academic success. Not only because you might not interact on a scientific level, but also because you might not be on the radar of the right people. I hate the idea of ‘playing the game’, it’s exhausting and feels very much like nepotism. I’m terrible at introducing myself to important people, wrongly assuming that if I work hard enough and am a good enough academic citizen that they will somehow notice me by accident. Of course this never happens. Important people are busy and aren’t spending their time browsing twitter for my latest splashy opinion piece or just randomly pubmedding all their junior colleagues. To meet important people one has to either pluck up the gumption to say ‘hi important person, here’s what I do and here’s why you should care’ and risk sounding like a bit of an arse or, one needs to be organically introduced by another person. A much easier option for the budding introvert.
Karyn Sproles, in a Times Higher Ed piece, gives a horrifying quote on this topic:
‘If your colleagues don’t like you, or just don’t know you very well, you might be surprised by the roadblocks you stand to face’.
She expands the roadblock metaphor wonderfully by saying that not only might the roadblock prevent you progressing your career, but that
‘you might not realise you’ve been rerouted, because it often happens in the form of not warning you about something or not giving you help with something else. You won’t even recognise that you’re on a side road until you fail to arrive where you thought you were headed. Someone might not deliberately give you bad directions, but they also might not say: “Stop! That’s a dead end.”’.
One of the things several friends of mine have noticed is that you need people to tell you things that you don’t know. Because the thing about things you don’t know is that you don’t know them, so you don’t know to ask. My own example is all the funding and so forth someone should have told me to apply for right at the beginning of my fellowship. I didn’t learn about this until too late. I spent a good two months beating myself up about it. How could I not know? Was I not cut out for this? Had I ruined everything? How could I be so dumb? But 20/20 hindsight can be cruel and that’s all it was. It took one of the friends to point out that I didn’t know what I didn’t know before I started to feel less guilty and self-flagellant about it all.
And this is why mentoring for ECRs is absolutely crucial and should be compulsory at the University level. Institutions should not allow people to get fellowships and then just leave them to float around on their own to see what happens. It’s the equivalent of taking a child’s money for piano lessons and then going ‘it’s over there in the corner, have a go and see how you get on’. You cannot expect to make a concert pianist that way. Not only is it detrimental to the ECR but their poor experience means they are more likely to leave. In a 2021 article on mentoring in academia, Francesco Marino describes the decline of effective mentoring in academia. He attributes no one cause, simply suggesting that teaching, fighting for your job, admin and research take up so much time and mental energy that actually being a good mentor – which is not incentivised at the majority of academic institutions – does not take priority in most people’s careers. Things like the REF and impact factors and funding competition mean that supervision of output and productivity take priority over active mentorship and junior scientists are encouraged to become small clones of their supervisor. Supervision is not mentoring. It can be, but in the majority of cases it isn’t.
Whilst all the courses and blogs and articles definitely teach you that mentees need to be pro-active and ask questions, mentors also need to think about the right things to ask and say. Think about the milestones it might be important to hit and point them out to your mentees. Ask them what they want to do with their careers and where they want to be, find out what kind of work-life balance they want to have, whether they want children or to live abroad. By finding these things out you can more effectively guide them to think about their own careers, whether those are inside or outside of academia, because a career is a little like a house. It needs to be planned and thought about and built by a team of experts. Yes, you can cobble a shack together out of palm leaves and string but it’s likely to leak in the rain. And with that glorious metaphor I shall leave you for today. Goodnight children, sleep well.
Dr Yvonne Couch
Author
Dr Yvonne Couch is an Alzheimer’s Research UK Fellow at the University of Oxford. Yvonne studies the role of extracellular vesicles and their role in changing the function of the vasculature after stroke, aiming to discover why the prevalence of dementia after stroke is three times higher than the average. It is her passion for problem solving and love of science that drives her, in advancing our knowledge of disease. Yvonne shares her opinions, talks about science and explores different careers topics in her monthly blogs – she does a great job of narrating too.
Adam Smith
Dementia Researcher
Dr Jodi Watt