 late 2017. And my interactions with students have been different. And I guess we can get into that more so later with questions. But I've also been a mentee. I feel like mentor for me has been very influential in my career success. I've been a part of several professional development organizations such as MSPHDs, my internship with Sores and Hollins, as well as I'm a current Bill Anderson-Fond Fellow alumni, which increases the under-replicitation minorities in the hazards and disasters field. I also felt it was very important for me to have mentors not only within my field, but also outside of my field, people who look like me, people who are women, people that don't look like me. And just to get a well-rounded perspective for my life, which is crazy sometimes, obviously. So yeah, I'm here to answer I guess questions on working with high school students, undergraduates, but also being someone who is actively being mentored by several individuals. And I'll turn it over to the next speaker. Thank you, Marty. Would you like to say your introductory remarks? Sure. So I'm Marty Snow. I'm a research scientist at the University of Colorado, the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. I do solar research. And I also run a 10-week REU program in Solar and Space Physics at what we call the Boulder Solar Alliance. It's a BLASP at CU, and then also several other institutes around Boulder. So we get a wide range of mentors in the program. So I of course have greatly benefited from being mentored in my career as an undergrad and a grad student. And then also as a junior scientist, other scientists continue to mentor me to this very day. And I don't know. I guess that's it. Thank you, Marty. Gavin, please go ahead. Hi, everyone. I'm a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at CU Boulder. And my mentoring experience is largely with mentoring graduate students and postdocs these days. But also we do have undergraduate researchers in our lab and I mentor as an academic advisor, undergraduate students in mechanical engineering and environmental engineering. And then I have participated in some campus or programs run through campus and also NGAR bringing in undergraduate or graduate level researchers from the university or from even from out of town programs like SOARS, Rebecca Burns, and yeah. So I'll talk about some experience. I think mentoring across a range of experiences and then also some of my own experiences coming up in academia and receiving mentorship at the level of an undergraduate to how I continue to receive mentorship from from colleagues and peers to this day. Thank you, Devin. And then our last we'll have Rebecca. Rebecca, do you want me to share your slide now or wait a minute? No, we can do that later. Maybe when we get to mentoring models or something. I'll just go ahead and do a quick introduction. Hello, everyone. My name is Rebecca Hocko. Thank you for joining us today. I serve currently as the director for education and outreach here at NCAR. And I also be the ASP program that is in part coordinating this mentoring panel today. And before I stepped into my current role, I was the PI and the director of the source program that Derrick mentioned earlier. So I've always had the pleasure throughout my career here in the US to support many mentors who are very dedicated and awesome. And I've learned a lot just seeing what it takes to mentor. I've mentored myself. I feel quite a bit and truly enjoy it. And I think I've also been very lucky to have had great mentors. And I want to say that I think mentors come from so many different directions at us. And sometimes we have to be able to recognize them. They might not always be in our STEM world. They might not always be somebody who is ahead of us career-wise. I think some of the best mentoring I get from peer mentors or from people who might time-wise be early career, but have taught me a lot. So I think I've learned that mentoring comes in many facets. And even today on the chat, I'm recognizing people I would consider my mentors. So that's really exciting. So yeah, real pleasure to be here. Thank you, Curtis, for leading this. Certainly. And thank you, everyone. So for those of you who may be joined late, what we're going to do now is we'll transition into just a general question and answer session. We ask that if you have questions, you type them in the chat. And then I'll refer those questions to the speaker. I'll do my best, certainly, to get to all questions as they come. But I think I'll go ahead and lead off with the first question. And specifically, Rebecca, I know you did mention those mentoring models. And so I think it would be worthwhile to share your slide with the group and to talk maybe about mentoring models. And then any of the other panelists will come you to join as well. Yeah, absolutely. I think when I think about mentoring and what I just tried to hint at a little bit is that we have to see in our entire environment who we work with and even who we interact with day to day, who could be, who can serve as mentors for different purposes. And once we pull up one model, the source program is known for having multiple mentors per student. And so if you're familiar with the source model, there you have a science mentor, a writing mentor, a community mentor, a peer mentor, a computing mentor. And that sounds like a lot. And it's often not quite as easy to manage in one single summer and having to interact with so many people and take guidance from all of them. But I think it's very worthwhile because you learn a little piece from each person. And so while in a program like source, it's kind of a formalized approach. I want to show you if Curtis can help us pull that up. A model that the Earth Science Women's Network shares, which I think is very valuable. So if you can see the screen, we consider this the support network map. So it doesn't specifically speak to mentoring, but I think it fits very well. So in the center of this is you. And you can think about many different things that you might need in your life and in your professional career. And as you see here in the different bubbles you have on top, something is who really gives you valuable feedback, honest feedback. Who supports you in your professional development? Who is there for you in emotional support? Who is your intellectual community? But also what can provide a safe space for you just to vent to check in those kind of things? Who is a role model for you, etc. And if you're honest, no single person can be all of these things for you. If you have that in someone, that's incredible and you're very, very lucky. You might also want to think not to over text that single person. But what you can do as an exercise, and we will share three hands out, handouts with you by the end of the call, is to try to fill this in. Who do you have in your life, in your professional life, in your personal life that can fulfill these roles? And if you have empty circles by the end of the exercise, that tells you where you might need to look a little bit more and where you can create maybe a bigger network. Or as I said earlier, if you have the same name in all of the bubbles, that might not be the best professional safety net. So I like this way of thinking about mentoring in terms of not every single person can be everything to you. And honoring and acknowledging that some people might fit in one of these categories really, really well and forgive them if they're maybe not helping you with some of these other areas. So that's one way I think about mentoring and mentoring models. And I'm not sure if the other panelists want to speak to that multi mentoring model as well. I agree, Rebecca. As I mentioned before, I didn't know that that was actually a model. Honestly, when I read Curtis's questions about mentoring models, I was like, oh, yeah, I have no theory about that. But I actually do have mentors and a lot that meets a lot of those different things. And I did that on purpose and also encourage my students to have mentors in different stages similar to that. So I really do like that concrete example. Certainly, thank you. And so we do have one question in the chat that comes to us from Daphne Ladoe. And she notes that given the ongoing health situation in the world, many programs, specifically REU programs are looking to go online this summer. And so what are some key elements of mentoring that may take some extra thought or effort transitioning from an in-person format to an online one? And that's to no one in particular. So I certainly have been thinking a lot about this for my REU program. I think it's almost certainly got to be online this year. And one of the challenges in an in-person REU is sometimes that the students and the mentors don't communicate well enough that the mentor will be waiting for the student to come talk to them. And the student will be hesitant to go interrupt the mentor in their busy schedule. So I think one of the things that I will need to stress to the mentors is set up regular times that you're going to communicate and make sure that you don't just let that slide. I think this is going to be even more important in the remote position. Communication is always key. And maybe in this situation, it's key. I think it's also important for the students to have a way to connect, whether that's via group me or weekly Zoom meetings or something like that, because they will be missing out on the, I guess, day-to-day living with their peers or something like that. And I feel like peer mentors is a part of the sores paradigm. And that's also very important to get through a program. And even more so important probably this summer as people are transitioning to virtual programs, the students feeling like they have support or also knowing that others are going through the same things that they are going through. Yeah, I guess I would just follow up on that. I don't have a RU student plan for this summer, but I do have a visiting grad student who showed up in Boulder about a week before everything kind of went remote. And so now we're communicating the same way that we were when she was back in Minnesota. But I just tried to give her more of that sort of peer group experience in addition to the meetings that I set up with her, which is sort of pretty similar to what they would have been, whether or not she was in Colorado. I've had my group members set up individual meetings with her, and then we have one group just kind of social chat scheduled. Again, I just try to make that sense of community. So it's taking that part of it online in addition to taking I think the core mentoring sort of intellectual research exchange online. And Marty, I think I heard you say, I don't know if it was before we started the call officially that like a Slack channel, was that what you mentioned? So we've already created a Slack channel for the RU participants, and I'm already encouraging them to start chatting with each other. Right now we're sharing experiences of how the virus is affecting our different communities and so on. So the cohort building is going to be the hardest task in a remote situation. So that's one way to do it. And I would just add as well, so the ASP postdoc cohort, excuse me, cohort at NCAR, they've also developed a Slack channel and some of the different labs and research groups have as well. So definitely maintaining that community in some format is important. Certainly, thank you everyone. Daphne has a follow on question about maybe the specific medium by which you maintain that virtual collaboration. So specifically down at the OU, RU, they're looking at GroupMe. Any thoughts about pros of cons of Slack versus GroupMe versus some other platform that you might be familiar with? I'm not familiar with GroupMe, but Slack seems to be kind of the default across a lot of communities. So yeah. Yeah, I know students in my RU several years ago were using GroupMe. I think it's one of the advantages on Slack is you can create several sub-channels for different subsets of the whole group. So that's probably one reason I have gone to using Slack. It looks like just to make sure if folks are not looking at the chat, GroupMe is perhaps a bit more linear where Slack allows for different threads and sub-threads. Another participant, Justin Gallimore, makes a comment that the platform Discord, which is commonly used for gamers and gaming to communicate, is also another potential interface and that has the benefit of having a pretty easy to use mobile application as well. I may or may not have used it myself at the time or two. And now we have another question maybe transitioning off of which medium we use from Olivia Clifton and NCAR ASP Postdoc. What are some of the things that you learned as a mentor early on in your careers? I guess being, I guess, fairly fresh into the mentoring, actively mentoring scene. A couple of things I learned is that you have to give a little, get a little or a lot. So you have to be willing to be open and vulnerable with your students sometimes. And the second thing leads on to that, which is also having boundaries. I've made myself available 24 seven for my students, especially when I work remotely. But sometimes that can get very taxing. And so when you're dealing with your own stuff, especially with me being an early career, trying to get my life together, while trying to help them get their lives together, it can be really emotionally like draining. So you have to learn to have, like, try to set some boundaries and also taking care of yourself. Because if you are struggling to, you can't pour from an empty cup. So you have to make sure that you're also taking care of yourself by setting those boundaries. Yeah, Olivia, you know, your question is interesting because you say what, what did we learn early on? And I can think of some things that I learned. I wish I learned it early on. Unfortunately, you know, they may have been things that I learned later on. But one of the things that I learned was particularly useful. And this kind of speaks to whatever I was saying, in terms of setting boundaries or just setting expectations. A couple years ago, maybe just two years ago, the PhD students in our program started, you know, the grad program had all the PhD students come to their advisor at the beginning of every year with this checklist of about 30 questions that we now go over with every new student that just sort of goes through a bunch of expectations. And some of these questions are kind of things that I would have covered anyways, like, okay, when, when are we going to meet? Like, what's our next meeting? And then some things are, are questions that I hadn't thought of to directly communicate upfront. As far as expectations for what's your availability, when you have an emergency, should I, should I text you? Should I call you? Should I email you? Should I run to your office? What's the best way to get a hold of you? When I can't get a hold of you? How long should I wait until I try again? You know, if you don't respond to an email within 24 hours or over the weekend, you know, sort of letting them know, you know, what your availability is, what those expectations are. And that would be sort of one, one part of this checklist. And I was trying to get a copy of it. I unfortunately didn't plan ahead well enough to get that to show. But it had a lot of, you know, just into availability, a lot of sort of, I think good questions to, again, help you set expectations with this other person and really just the act of kind of writing them down. It's not so much like you just say, here are my expectations. It's a form that we both go through and we both sign it at the end and say, yeah, we've discussed all these points. And it really helped, I think, sort of the mentoring relationship that I have more recently kind of get off to, to smoother sailing. Thank you, Ed. Daven, it looks like from Deanna Henson at the University of Illinois, if that checklist is something that could be shared, certainly let us know we can include it in the packet afterwards. And then it looks like we have a question from Serita Brown. With this transition to an all day remote mentoring schedule, how many students would you suggest that a mentor take on? Well, I think it depends what type of mentoring it sounds like. From the question, it sounds like a internship or research type mentoring. And there I would say, oh, maybe one or two, not more. Or if you have a research group, maybe you can take on a team. But that, I could imagine, same as you would take people on in a one-on-one situation in a lab and a physical lab space. If it's career mentoring or other type of mentoring, it might be possible to do more or to do group meetings as well. So I think it depends very much on what type of mentoring we're talking about. And then we have another question from LJ West too. From the perspective of a mentee, what were the most helpful things that a mentor did for you? So, well, I guess looking, thinking about the mentor model, it sort of depends. So, but I think first of all, just being human, I find it a lot easier to connect with my mentor when I feel like I can go to them and be vulnerable, whether it's about my mental health issues or career issues or understanding a work problem or something like that, just being human first. But also being honest and helping me write down ways to navigate whatever situation that I'm in. So really listening to what I'm saying, but also having an objectivity to where they're not necessarily emotional with me, they just kind of, they're very calming to me and help me literally like write down, okay, what are your next steps? But also getting me the help that I need. I know I have some issues, mental health issues starting sores and being able to go to my mentors and say like, hey, I have this issue and then being able to recognize like, okay, we might need to escalate this to a certain level of help and we're going to walk you through it. So I think helping me solve problems and teaching me how to help myself where some of the, I guess, best things that people have given me. Yeah, I would think the best thing mentors, and again, could be anyone, a peer mentor, someone I work with have done for me is the honesty part. I very much appreciate of course when people listen and they tell me, oh, you're right and all of those things, but ultimately the really substantial and productive feedback of saying, have you thought about this? Have you considered this? I think that's been the most helpful. And from a mentor perspective, that's a tricky thing to do because you have to judge when does somebody just wants to be heard and listen to and work it out, and when is someone ready to hear feedback. And so I find that is often the hardest emotional work to figure that out and to give a person or a mentee in that moment what they need and learning that. And I've certainly made a lot of mistakes there before. And yeah, kind of judging on both sides, when does somebody want to have a problem solved with them? And when do they want support to solve the problem on their own? Thank you. And Derricka, there was a specific follow-up question from Allison Rudd. What does being vulnerable with your mentee look like? I guess the best example, a lot of students is ridiculous what they go through. And it's not like I don't know that. But yeah, so sometimes they would come to me and I don't necessarily just force them to talk to me. But when they do, I have a closed-door session that tells me what's going on. And if it's something that I can directly relate to, then I try to reveal that to let them know, hey, it's okay, I understand what you're going through. And even if I don't, like just helping walk them through their feelings. So not guessing how they feel, but talking to them in a way that allows them to expose how they feel and offer suggestions for help and different resources to help them out. But a lot of times it's really me, it's really like, hey, it's absolutely normal to feel this way, go through XYZ. I've been there or I've had a friend that go through it. So really trying to humanize their experience based on my own or what I know from others that I've been around. So in my situation where I'm usually mentoring kind of upper-level undergrads, they often have a lot of concerns about what they want to do with their lives. They don't know their career path. And so they really appreciate it when I share sort of the twisting path that I took to get where I am, that you don't have to be instantly successful on day one. You can wander the forest for a little while and you can still end up in a great spot. And I think that really helps them reduce their anxiety about not knowing exactly what to do next. Thank you. And a question previously from Olivia again, how do you gauge a mentee's responses to your mentorship? That's such a tough question to answer. I don't know. Like, it's weird, but how much they, like no matter how much I fuss at them and then I'm immediately feeling like guilty, like, they'll cling to me in a sense. They continue to come back and ask for help, even if it's, I have to give them tough love about things that they don't necessarily want to hear. There are some, I remember when I first started, I went off so bad on the juniors at the time, I just knew that they would never ever talk to me again. And I felt like I actually, I was like heartbroken, but it had to be done. And I just knew I screwed up. And then I went back to work a few days later. And it was like, I went from them looking at me as a strange person, you know, who really didn't understand or whatever to like someone that they respected. And so they always knew like, okay, you know, we understand, like, don't fuss, we get it now. And I started seeing improvement in their behavior, or hearing a student say, honestly, before you came along, I never even considered graduate school. So those little tidbits, it's like, you think you're feeling, but then something happens and you realize like, oh man, like they actually were listening, I wasn't talking to a brick wall, even though they make you feel that way. I'm pretty sure my mentors feel that way about me as well. They tell me to slow down or something is like they're talking, you know, to a brick wall with me. But I listen, I just think it's just natural to push back sometimes. But ways I found is like in their behavior, like, it may not seem like they get it or they're not listening, but you see little changes. And it makes you feel better about having to be a little tougher sometimes. Yeah, I think the delayed effect is, is true. You sometimes don't see it right away. And I think as a mentor, you also shouldn't expect a thank you. That's not why you're in it. It's nice when people say, oh, great advice or something. But really, the gratification is in if you see that people are happy. And as Marty says, they're finding their way. And that might take a while. And then sometimes people go back to me years later and say, wow, now I'm in this in this space, it took me a while to get there. But and they remember things that apparently I said that I, I can't remember. But yeah, it takes a while. And that's okay. And I think it's okay if people in the moment aren't always happy with you either. I don't think you're a mentor because you want more friends. I think you are a mentor because you would like to help people. And because you have benefited from it, and you want to share. I would add to these, to this discussing that, you know, there's, there's direct ways that you can ask for this feedback as well. I mean, you can ask for your mentee to evaluate you. You know, I for my graduate students of postdocs, we do annual evaluations of them. And then I also use that opportunity for them essentially evaluate me. Is there anything I could be doing more of less that less of. And I've also noticed that, you know, it can be useful to bring in a third party in that sort of context, because they may not be comfortable telling you directly, because you're also maybe in a position of, you know, just their mentor, you're also their boss. And so for various stages of, you know, university promotion, etc, I'll get to see like 10 anonymous letters written by my former students where they evaluate me as a mentor. And that's been super eye opening, you know, and it's good stuff and it's critical stuff. And, you know, I think you can engage a third party to collect that sort of information. If you feel like you know, have a mentee that might not be comfortable giving you that feedback directly. Also, there's a question I did find the checklist I had mentioned earlier. I find it I the grad coordinator emailed it to me. I don't know how best to distribute it to this entire list, probably just send it to Curtis. Either that or if you have it in like a Google Drive or something, you could just share the link in the chat. However you want to do that, just let me know. Okay. There was a previous question that was in a formal program. How do you pair mentors and mentees in a way such that you ensure a good fit? A challenge. There's probably a more informed answer than that. Right, right. Well, I mean, you know, the answer I'm going to give is, you know, certainly in an RU program where I get, you know, 400 applicants, I don't know those applicants, but I do know the mentors. And so, so it's mostly which student do I think is going to fit with that mentor. But, but yeah, there's there's a lot of uncertainty. You're rolling the dice. Yeah, what we used to do in source, and I'm fairly sure the new source director is still doing that, is we had phone conversations with the new students. So we got at least a little feel for for them and see what they're interested in. And yeah, Marty's right, we know most of our mentors. And then we propose matches, but have them check in with each other. So the students in the source program have a say who they work with. And if they feel after that initial contact maybe even just by email or phone call is not going to work at all, then we try to rearrange things. And yeah, it's it's sometimes it's hit and miss. And I think giving people the the opportunity to find that alternative mentors is important. So no one feels stuck in a situation or having multiple mentors. So at least you have someone else you click with in that particular summer, say if it's a summer program. Thank you. And a question, it might not be showing up in the chat. But it is from NRLA Morales, another ASP postdoc. And she says, how do you handle situations when a student or one of your mentees want you to tell them what decision they should make? How do you encourage and support them to trust themselves and make their own decisions? Maybe while you get your thoughts, maybe I'll share what my own advisor did as a conversation starter. So when I was a graduate student at the University of Nebraska, you know, my advisor, he was really just open and cordial and said, you know, he was happy to engage if if he needed to come by my office daily or even, you know, 7am in the morning and 5 in the evening and, you know, check in and see kind of what I did the night before what I did the day of, he was happy to do so. Or if we just checked in, you know, once a week or even less, he really just empowered me to make sure that, you know, I sought his help as I wanted. And he really just continuously said, you know, it's your choices. You're here for in the context of grad school, you came here because you wanted to hopefully no one told you you have to go to grad school. So, you know, he was kind of like a sink or swim on your own. I'm here to help you, but the choices that you're going to make the research you're going to do, whether you go for master's or and or PhD beyond that, it was your call. So he I think it was just in his case, his personality was very open to that type of relationship. That's my own experience with being empowered to make my decisions. You know, even though especially at the beginning, yeah, there were times I was like, so what should I do? And he was like, well, what do you think? So I think maybe just when maybe when you're asked that question, it is a good idea to throw it back and kind of spark that conversation. Yeah, I would agree, Curtis, sometimes you have to throw it back at people or just be like, again, echoing back what you think you're hearing. And you can use something I well, what I think I'm hearing you saying is this is this right and just giving it back and let people hear what what we hear from them. And I would say it also depends on the situation. So if it is a really big life decision, I don't think as a mentor, we have any place of giving this specific advice, you should do this or that, I agree a person should really talk to multiple people and try to inform their own decision. If it is something quick, that can just really help. I think I'm more willing to say, okay, here's what I think. Because there's nothing more frustrating when you're stuck in a situation and you really just need an answer and somebody keeps saying, so what do you think you want to do? You also need to judge a little bit the frustration level of the person in that moment and how much they're really in a space to make a decision on their own. And how big of a deal is it in that moment? So I think just judging the situation a bit. Yeah. So then a question in the chat. Did you engage in any training or preparation before becoming a mentor that was particularly helpful? And then as a second part, what do you wish you had known as a new mentor? I had no training whatsoever. I swear I was just thrown into it. I was not prepared. But I tried to because I was also in a position of being a mentor by other people, I tried to take all of their best practices with me and apply it to my students. One thing that I find very helpful is to really get to know each student for who they are and handle them how like uniquely. So I can't use a one size fit all for every student. Every student has different unique needs come from different backgrounds. And yes, that can be a lot of work, but it's very important depending on what kind of mentoring that you're doing to really connect with the student and be the best for them. There are times when I can say, hey, I'm not the best person to mentor you, but I know XYZ people. So I'm going to defer you to them and still be here to support you ultimately. But there's only so much that I can do based on your experience and what you need. But I really wished I had some level of training, but I feel like the most important thing to remember is that you're dealing with another human. So think about how you would want to be treated and try to apply that to the student. Yeah, I guess I would second that that I had very little training other than, you know, sort of you can draw from your own experiences as having been in mentee, but all of a sudden you get dropped in a child where you have your own mentees. And, and yeah, I never had the opportunity to even participate in listening to something like this, which would have been very useful. That being said, you know, these sorts of opportunities are, they are out there. And if I had sought that, I probably could have found it, you know, learning, learning by fire or learning on the job, you know, may have not been the greatest approach. So yeah, I would encourage folks to seek out these sorts of activities. Obviously, I'm preaching to the choir because everyone here is already online. But you know, in addition to this as other resources, somebody I think mentioned in the chat, like there's this other, you know, you can just Google, you know, mentor mentee agreement contracts and find lots of examples of those, you know, didn't occur to me to do that as a first year mentor, but I could have. And then, Daven, there was a follow up question to you earlier. When you get feedback from your mentees, is there a point that comes up very often and would be helpful for all mentors to know? Good question. I mean, you know, one of the sort of themes of this dialogue that you're hearing here is that, you know, every sort of mentor-mentee relationship depends on, you know, the people involved in those often tend to be very unique. So some people are getting a lot of, you know, career mentorships, some people are getting technical mentorships, some people are getting more, you know, personal emotional mentorships. And so that, you know, that changes. And so the feedback is pretty diverse, but I would say one thing that I have noticed over times on the more sort of critical side is that students themselves wanted more feedback from me. You know, I think as a grad school advisor that, again, you know, we, for postdocs and professional staff, they got undergo like an evaluation process once a year. But for the graduate students, there's nothing formal like that. They just have, they have their preliminary exam, they have their candidacy exam, and they have their defense. So it's possible that in a span of five years, they only get feedback on how they're doing at three points. You know, I mean, yeah, maybe they're getting some inclinations from you in weekly meetings or group meetings. Are you satisfied with their performance or, you know, do you think they could be doing more of this or more of that? But you may not be taking the time to explicitly set aside time for it. Here's my feedback on how I think you're doing. And so students appreciate more of that. So I try to, you know, I think on a kind of quarterly to semester base to say, here's, you know, let's have one of our meetings devoted towards evaluating this relationship. How well do I think you're doing? How well do you think I'm doing? And, you know, for some students, that's a very easy conversation that we can just have in person. And other, might prefer to have that via email or you write something down or again, go through a third party, but opening that channel to evaluate the relationship on a kind of regular basis, you know, a couple of times a year is something that the students asked for. And then I've tried to incorporate more of. Thank you. And then we have a question from Matthew Paulus. As a mentor, especially during a short program like a summertime REU, how do you identify if, when and how much your mentee either wants or needs to be mentored, especially when they have lots of other demands on their time doing their research writing workshops, things like that? I would, as a general notion, I would think it's probably more than you think. And I think somebody said that earlier sometimes silence is not a good thing. So just because somebody hasn't reached out to you and you know, they're really busy with a lot of other projects, we might hold back and say, oh, I'll leave them alone. I check in next week. But I, I would air on the side of checking in too many times, and then asking the mentee for feedback as Devin says, is this too much? Do you want to check in less time? But I would say, especially at the beginning of a short program, air on the side of checking in quite a bit, because time can just fly by. And then it's really hard to catch up if you missed a week or two of, of valuable interaction. So I would say check in frequently, and rather air on the side of overdoing it, and then asking the mentee if it's too much, or if you at some point can ease it up a bit. Yeah, I would second that. I think, you know, I've had times where students, students have emailed me and they've said, well, you know, for whatever reason, I was, I was busy with exams or the computer systems were down. I have no new results to show you. Can we, can we cancel this week's meeting? I'll say, you know, it's fine for us to sort of cancel it in terms of, you know, our expectations of what you're going to show. But let's, let's just check in. And especially now that all the checking in is done remotely, you're not even asking them to go out of their way, come to your office, come to campus, just like, let's open the Zoom chat for a couple minutes and just touch base. And, and maybe that's all it is. Maybe it's five minutes, you say hi, how are you doing? And sometimes it opens up some other conversations. And so yeah, trying to air on the side of, of touching, touching base is more frequently than less. And even if the student isn't necessarily asking for that, I think it's a good approach. I agree with all of that. The, I can't remember a single time that a student, you know, at the end of program evaluation said that, you know, they, they talked to their mentor too much, right? It's, it's totally the other that you should always air on the side of communicating with your students. As we, I don't see any new questions in the chat. Hopefully that's accurate. But I did want to ask one of my questions that kind of in terms of the challenges that you can find in a mentoring relationship, if you find yourself in a bad situation, whether you are the mentor or the mentee, what are the steps and strategies to improve it? And at what point do you decide that perhaps this mentoring relationship, you need to move on from it? Yeah, I think there's, that's a really good, good question. I think having been in this position as a, as a mentor with students where this relationship sort of starts to break down, you know, many of us are part of larger organizations where there's, you know, ombuds folks or outside counsel, professional counseling services that can be referred to or even brought in to, to help with the situation that I had with a student to get to the point where I had to have somebody from counseling services, a third person in the room, in all of our meetings for a period of time, I had to block emails for a period of time. I said, we're not communicating this way. This way is, you know, it turned out to be harmful. And so we switched to a different form of communicating, brought in third party and, and got through it actually. And, and, and now I have a great working relationship and, you know, it, but it wasn't something I could do on my own. I was, I was way out of my league in terms of figuring out how to address the students needs and figure out what they needed. And so, yeah, I sought professional help from, from the other resources that my institution. And I guess that part of that question is that didn't happen instantaneously. There was an escalation of, of events that get to that point. When you get to that point, I think sort of judgment call, but you kind of know when you're out of your, out of your depth. Any other thoughts to kind of dealing with the challenging mentoring situations? Haven't necessarily had a bad experience in terms of, I guess, disrespect from a student or anything like that. I've had to check students on their behavior. And it is very uncomfortable. But as I mentioned before, something that you have to do and making sure that you tell the proper people, like tell my department chair, Hey, this is what's going on with this student. Just keep an eye out. I just want to make you aware. But I do have challenges with students disappearing. And I guess the challenge for me is being able to just let it go. And I tell my students now, once I meet them as freshmen or whenever, like, I'm here for you, I will fight for you and I will fight you. Not physically, but like, make sure that you're in line. But once you disappear on me, I'll try for an extended time, you know, checking in. But once you're gone, I have to move on and focus on the students that are, you know, around and need my help. And it's very, very hard to do that. But what else can you really do? So I guess that's one challenging thing that I had to learn to deal with. You can only chase someone. You can't force your help on people, no matter how much you want to. So you just have to be willing to let go sometimes. Certainly. Thank you, David and Derek, both for sharing those experiences. A question. Have any of you mentored and are you student virtually or remotely on a research project in the past? And if so, how did that work out? Haven't done, you know, like a full program remotely, like we may be considering for this summer, but you know, there have been times where, you know, a student gets sick halfway through the program or something and, you know, then works remotely. And, you know, in that case, you've already built up a relationship with the student, you know, for a month. Whereas, you know, so you can build on that in the, you know, Zoom meetings. So it's a brave new world where that's your first and only meeting is remotely. So we'll see how that works. Yeah, I would say we had the same situation as Marty so far only where we had people first come together and then maybe go off site. And that is certainly way easier. We'll have to see how it goes. If we all have to go to online models this year, I'm still, I'm an optimist. I'm so hopeful maybe we can then all get together maybe at a conference in the fall if life comes back to normal. So maybe it's the reverse process where you build a relationship virtually and work together. And then it's going to be actually a lot of fun getting together in the fall and meeting people in person. So I'm trying to be hopeful that we'll be able to do that at least. Yeah, I second that, Rebecca. Fingers crossed. And then a question, what are the most helpful tools or strategies that you've used in a mentoring relationship? Oh, you can go. No, go ahead. I don't mean to go ahead, Derek. I was just going to say like working with high school students who think they know everything and undergraduate students who think they know everything just really checking my attitude before addressing them with certain things. That's a huge thing not reacting emotionally because there are some times where you really want to, but you have to take a 10 second breath and then like address the situation and not with the same fire that they're giving you. And yeah, it takes a lot of strength to really just like swallow your emotions and address the hurt in the student and like see beyond like what they're giving you in that moment, which can be very difficult. I think it's really helped me to check myself before addressing the situation. Yeah. And then not waiting until it's too late to say something. And then yeah, it just gets out of control. Yeah, I find, Derek, that is so, I love that you said that. And for me, it's often if we're so busy running from one thing to the other. And then we need somebody who considers us a mentor maybe or a peer mentor, checking in with ourselves if we can actually show up in that moment and be helpful. And another thing I meant to say was checking our own biases when we address the situation or when we have an interaction with someone. Because we are all just humans and we might be interpreting a situation out of a place that we're coming from. And it might absolutely not be the truth and just reminding ourselves of that and being able to meet the person where they are and in their own truth. It's hard work. And so doing it in between two other meetings is never a good idea. I've learned that. So rather say, I don't have time right now and I really would love to talk to you more and let's find a time where I can be there mentally and emotionally and be able to support you. So instead of just trying to squeeze it in, I think that's something that I had to do as a strategy. Thank you. And then I have a question. As you advance in your careers, where do you get your mentoring from? Obviously, we focus now on early career and students, but what about as you become more expert in your fields and progress through your careers? Where do you get your mentoring from? From Marty. No, I was going to say you. But no, no, I mean, it definitely is true that we continue to be mentored by by our peers and, you know, either in your institution or people you meet at conferences or anything. So the mentoring never stops. Yeah, I would say that a lot of that moves to perhaps less formal settings. You know, it may be happening more informally. A lot of it is happening at the at the bar at a conference, you know, when you're able to talk with colleagues and and your peers or, you know, the more seasoned colleagues, perhaps. And, you know, that that's a really important part of keeping up those networks. There are, you know, I know in my institution, my department, there are some formal peer mentoring arrangements set up now, but I'm now at the point where I'm on the, even at that within my department, I'm on the mentor side. So if I'm looking for a formal relationship, you know, I don't really have one, but as kind of, you know, through just sort of my social network and my professional network opportunities for that. And on the chat, Daphne LeDoux makes a great point as well that, you know, many of the more senior scientists in the field also get mentored by the younger and early career as well. And it's that it's that two-way street of mentoring. A question in the chat is any suggestions for helping mentees with burnout, especially in the faster paced programs? I've dealt with a high school student this past summer who was heading towards burnout and just seeing a lot of myself in her and using my experience and letting them know, like, hey, work is always going to be there. You need to find a balance, even though it's something that I'm still working on myself, finding that balance, but learning early on, like seeing it early in that stage, it really triggered me to, you know, help them figure out a way to balance work with real life. And even my undergraduate students, which I don't have too much of an issue, my undergrad's getting them to have a work-life balance. They just do whatever they want. But so far I have dealt with a high school student and just trying to encourage her to really just take a step back and take some of the pressure off of them and to let them know that it's okay to not be okay. It's okay to breathe a little. And so breathing is a mantra I tell all of my students to do because a lot of times we actually forget to breathe. We're just going, going, and going. So just taking a step back, breathing, revisiting your goals and revisiting a plan, a realistic plan to achieving those goals really helps the students to, you know, sort of slow down a little bit. And if they are burnt out, let them know that it's okay. A lot of people have gone through that, but it's important to take care of yourself first because if you do burn out, you're not going to achieve anything that you're really going for. You can might not actually continue with what you're doing if you're working on 20%. And so that sometimes helps. I would add to that, you know, there's probably some steps that you can kind of take to preemptively avoid burnout. You know, it depends on what type of program you're talking about, but say, if I have a new postdoc who's going to start, you know, I've had postdocs say, okay, well, I'm finishing my defense on Monday and I can start on Wednesday. I said, no, no, no. You finish your defense on Monday. I don't want to get a single email from you for like two or three weeks. Do not, do not talk to me. I don't have any expectation of, you know, you respond to anything like, you go take a break, go hang out with family going, whatever. You know, in a short program like an REU, you might say, look, I don't have any expectation that you're going to respond to this email on Saturdays or, you know, you set aside some time for them to preemptively kind of avoid that. Let them know what that expectation is. Yeah. And I would say to that also modeling that behavior. So I've tried, even if I'm working on the weekend, not to then bombard students or postdocs with my emails and or at the evenings and try that my staff doesn't get emails from me too much in the evenings or on weekends and kind of modeling it and saying, it's okay to disconnect. And you're not expected to respond to these things all the time. I think it's really important and yeah, Derek, I, I'd like your point of just reminding people to breathe. I mean, that's a really good point. We forget we just keep going and going and I think just addressing it, bringing it up at the beginning of a program or at the beginning of an appointment and saying it is, it is okay to fail. It's okay not to be here all the time. It's okay not to be okay. And just having an open conversation about it, even if people are not stressed out yet, you can then refer to it back later and say, remember, we said that four weeks ago. I think now you at that point, so it doesn't come out of nowhere. So bringing up these issues before they go bad and how we're going to deal with it. And maybe David as part of your expectations, right, setting that at the beginning, if I see you struggling, what do you want me to do? I'm just asking that. Rebecca was saying of the, you know, make sure that that both you and the student have realistic expectations of what's going to happen in the summer, you know, that is the burnout because the student, you know, has expects that they'll be able to do, you know, 10 things when in fact there isn't enough time for anybody to do those 10 things that, you know, really you should be working on four things. And sort of, you know, when you sense some burnout, step back and say, well, is that because this is, you know, that you bitten off more than than a reasonable person could chew or, you know, and also, you know, I definitely love the it's okay to fail, you know, certainly in this sort of first experience doing research, you know, that students may not know at all what they're getting into. And as a mentor, you're trying to have them come out with success. And, you know, success can can look many different ways. But you definitely want everybody at the end to have a good experience, whether that means we wrote a paper, or we found out that this isn't the kind of research that that you want to do, right. So both of those are good experiences. I would say from an NTS perspective, me facing burnout, knowing how it feels to crash a burn. What I've been recently, since I mentioned my local road was virtually, and then she set up a meeting with me in person. And we literally went over all of my expectations. And then we developed realistic expectations. And that helped so much. Now I'm taking this big chunk of what I'm doing and breaking it down into a small actual like manageable tasks. But even asking each one of my supervisors, what do you expect from me during a certain amount of time? Excuse me. And so that helped me realize what I actually wanted to do was like, way beyond what they actually expect of me. And I think the hardest part, like coming out of grad school or being in a postdoc is like trying to reprogram your brain to realize that the same level that you were operating in in graduate school is not necessarily the same level that you need to operate in, you know, post grad. And that's something that I made sure to have me to press too high and supervise mentors who had me navigate how to make that transition mentally, but also in my work. And so I have to cut myself off at a certain time and say, okay, I'm not going to work at this time, or I'm not going to answer emails, or I'm going to have to force myself to be okay with this, even though I'm freaking out like, oh my gosh, I'm the worst no employee in the world, because I'm not answering emails at 12 o'clock in the morning. Not that anyone sent it to me, but that's how I feel. So to hear people like Becker Hacker say, it's okay to not be okay. I told myself that to listen to even my advisor in grad school say to get a life outside of grad school. And he not only told us that he emulated it in his actions, like running was an essential part of his day. And you nothing could keep him from that period. I don't care. And he had kids and a wife who was also in the field. So it was like he emulated what he was telling us. And so that really helped me to resist burnout, even though I'm sorry headed and did I wanted to do sometimes I'm learning now though as an early career to make better habits. But a lot of the strategies that you all mentioned are things that my mentors are actively doing for me now. And they are helpful. So thank you. And certainly thank you all for your thoughts there. It looks like we have one more question in the chat. And then if there aren't any questions by 1050, I'll ask each of you to respond to a final question. But for the question remaining in the chat for now, how do you separate mentoring from parenting? It seems like there are a lot of cases where those lines perhaps could become blurred. Honestly, sometimes those blurred lines are necessary. Depending on the case, I do work in my high school student, I do a lot of at risk type students. And so sometimes mentoring can take on a role of filling in the gap of what they're not getting at home or even at school. So I feel like it's a case by case basis have a lot of students who are very independent didn't need that much hands on help. But I had other students who even though I was maybe six years older than them, they look to me as a parent and I have stepped in that role, because it's what that particular student needed to be successful. And I was committed to helping them in any way that I could without drowning myself, essentially. Any other responses to the mentoring and parenting question? I love the question. I think it's a great question. And so I'm fascinated by Greek mythology. And in Greek mythology, the role of mentor, it's actually a person, if you look it up, was in charge of taking care of someone when the parent was away. And on one of these big exploratory travels, you can look that up. And so I sometimes have to remind myself that a mentor isn't necessarily a parent, and setting those boundaries and saying how much, and I agree with Erica depending on what the student needs. But in most cases at work, I would say having those clear boundaries of what we're not doing for a student or with a student is really important and having that clear to ourselves if it comes up. And again, you can't solve all problems for people as tempting as it is, because then as a mentor, you burn out. And that's where you emotionally might get so involved that it ends up impacting you a lot. And it might not be the best for the student. But I think it's one of the hardest things to make that judgment. I don't think it's easy. And I've certainly, I'm sure I failed at that where I either offered too little or too much, depending on what the student needed. So yeah, I love the question. I think it's a great question. And it's one of the hardest things to figure out. It's a great question. And the blurring is telling your student to have good mental health as a professional mentor. And then that can also be, you know, you should take a break and like take a shower today, sort of thing. So yeah, it can be a blurred line. Certainly, thank you all for that. In the interest of making sure that we don't go over time, I think now is probably a fine time for a final question. And so, I'd like you each to respond. And it's really simple. It's just why do you mentor? What are the fundamental reasons for those of us like myself who have interest in mentoring, have benefited from mentoring in the past? What would you say to people to ask that question? Why do you personally serve as a mentor for whichever groups of students or scientists that you do? And feel free to take, you know, a couple minutes each for your response if you'd like. I'm happy to go first. So there's kind of two main things. One, you know, I've received great mentoring throughout my career. So I like to give back. And so this is one way to do it. And it also, you know, keeps me inspired to keep working hard. You know, there was a period in my career where I wasn't really mentoring students and I was getting more burned out. But then, you know, I started mentoring others. And that really, you know, brought back my inspiration for why I loved doing science. So it's kind of a two-way street of, you know, you want to keep the pipeline of mentor, mentee going, but also, you know, as a mentor, I benefit from interacting with people I mentor. So those are kind of my two big things. Yeah, to build on that, when we survey mentors at the end of a summer program or throughout other programs and ask them, why do you mentor and what do you get out of it? Most of them do echo Marty's remark of its energizing, um, it's rewarding personally, but also really great new science ideas are developed by bringing in new perspectives and diverse perspectives. And some of our mentors tell us that they even make new collaborations and open new partnerships with people, sometimes even within the same lab with people they see every day in the cafeteria. But now because they're mentoring together or their student meets a new connection, they suddenly open up their own network. And I think that's incredibly gratifying. And yeah, personally, I would agree with all those things. It is so inspiring to mentor. I could not imagine a career without that influx of new ideas and diverse ideas. I think it would be a really boring day if I didn't have that. It's a really good question. I guess I'll, I'll second what's been said before and that, you know, there's sort of a selfish component to it almost that like I get a lot out of it, you know, I get ideas from the students, the people that I'm mentoring and then, you know, you personally in your, you know, me personally in my lab, then I'm able to do more because you've trained folks, you know, that's sort of more about maybe advising and mentoring, but, you know, it allows you to try new ideas. You have somebody that can help you on projects. So it helps me giving back, you know, I think about my own experience as an undergrad, being mentored by grad students by faculty, you know, is an invaluable way for me to learn about research. There aren't really classes that teach you that. And so I think, you know, for me, that's one reason why I like to have undergraduate students in my lab or be a part of these programs. Lastly, I'll mention one thing that, you know, maybe is a little, well, there's a lot of funding opportunities for doing research that require an educational outreach component to them, either getting funding from NSF or NASA. And for, you know, the reason I know about or got involved with the SOARS program in part was because I needed a outreach component to include in a NASA proposal. And so I heard about SOARS and said, oh, that looks good. And it's this program that already exists. And I don't have to go sort of invent something to do on my own related to education and outreach. I can just sign up to be a mentor as part of this program. And it worked great. You know, it ticked off all these other things that I said I like about mentoring, but it also helps you participate in the broader sort of education outreach component that is often required part of doing, you know, research or other aspects of our job. And so that's, yeah, it's kind of a win-win-win in that way. Yeah, to echo what everyone has said, to be honest, I didn't expect to be a mentor so soon. One, I'm naturally introverted. So being social, especially with kids, I feel like are way cooler than me. Like it was very difficult to break into it. But like I said, I was sort of thrown into it. And I realized it's probably the most rewarding things in my career. And one of the reasons why I have like different part-time jobs, because I refuse to give it up, I feel like me mentoring, especially at Jackson State and with my high school to undergrad British program, I'm a source of representation that they normally don't get to see. And so it's very rewarding to help expose the next generation of scientists of color in the meteorology field. And to be a representation like, hey, we do exist, you can pursue this field is very important to me. And it is a selfish component. Like the students energize me, they teach me all the cool new things. Like I said, I'm an introvert. So I wasn't the most very socially awkward in a lot of situations. But I enjoy being a support for them. It really makes my day. I think I'm not a very emotional person. But when my junior class graduated in 2018, to like share in their joy and to know that out of the five graduates, three went into government, one went to grad school, and the other is actively pursuing getting into the weather service. Like, that's just amazing feeling. It's like I can share in their successes. I can help them navigate their failures or so called perceived failures. And it really makes me feel good to do that. Like I can't lie, I absolutely hate being a program coordinator, but I asked I stayed because I love working with the students. I absolutely love taking them to AMS or other conferences and seeing how excited they are about all of the opportunities that they never would have gotten if I wasn't there advocating for them. Not saying that's false all on me, but I do know that I do have that impact. And so I try to be a good steward of that. And it feels so good to be in that role. So that's why I mentor. Oh, certainly. Thank you. And just on behalf of the committee, I want to take this moment to thank all of our panelists, but also participants for joining the call this morning as well. So thank you. Thank you very much all. And for those of you on the chat, I posted a message there with my email in case you missed anything. It is our intention. There's a lot of helpful links that were posted earlier in the chat. So please take a moment, scroll up and check those out. If you haven't had a chance to do so. Otherwise, it's our intention to make this recording available. I think Valerie Sloan will assist us with doing that. And I also wanted to just make a plug for some of our future seminars coming up in either April or May. We hope to have another panel type discussion on networking and how you develop collaboration. So certainly we've touched on some of those there. And I think we would definitely welcome all of you to join us for future seminars as they come. But in lieu of that, again, thank you to the panelists and participants. Wish everyone to both stay well and be well. And thank you for joining this morning. Again, feel free to send an email if you missed anything or have any remaining questions. Thank you. No, thank you, everyone. This is great. Thank you for having us.