Our very own terrestrial ecosystem ecologist, Dr. Paul Grogan, will talk to us about
Mentors and mentoring
at 12:30 in the EEB lounge (BioSciences 4338)
Almost all of us (st
udents as well as faculty) are mentors in some way. Mentoring, like teaching, is a core activity for many scientists (and in related ways for most other professions), and yet few of us have had any formal training in either. Most of us plod along, subconsciously drawing on our own experiences of being mentored, and “learning by our mistakes”. Guidelines on the goals of mentoring, and how it can best be achieved are extraordinarily rare in the literature. In this seminar, I will offer some reflections on the process of mentoring in science, and in particular I will focus on how each of us might develop and improve our own mentoring. I anticipate that the discussion will be of just as much interest to those in the audience who consider themselves primarily as mentees, since it should provide useful insights into the process that they are going through.
Dr. Paul Grogan has been with the Queen’s Department of Biology for the past 11 years. He recently participated in a celebration of his own Ph.D. supervisor’s (Prof. F.S. (Terry) Chapin – U.C. Berkeley and U. Alaska Fairbanks) contributions to science and society that resulted in the following publication: Grogan, P, Eviner, V., and Hobbie, S.E. 2013. The Qualities and Impacts of a Great Mentor – and How to Improve your own Mentoring. Bulletin of Ecological Society of America 94:170–176. Open access at http://dx.doi.org/10.1890/0012-9623-94.2.170.
Dr. Grogan’s lab website can be found here.
eebseminar.wordpress.com 