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- Abstract
- Undergraduate research experiences in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields are championed for promoting students’ personal and professional development. Mentorship is an integral part of undergraduate research, as effective mentorship maximizes the benefits undergraduates realize from participating in research. Yet almost no research examines instances in which mentoring is less effective or even problematic, even though prior research on mentoring in workplace settings suggests negative mentoring experiences are common. Here, we report the results of a qualitative study to define and characterize negative mentoring experiences of undergraduate life science researchers. Undergraduate researchers in our study reported seven major ways they experienced negative mentoring: absenteeism, abuse of power, interpersonal mismatch, lack of career support, lack of psychosocial support, misaligned expectations, and unequal treatment. They described some of these experiences as the result of absence of positive mentoring behavior and others as actively harmful behavior, both of which they perceive as detrimental to their psychosocial and career development. Our results are useful to mentors for reflecting on ways their behaviors might be perceived as harmful or unhelpful. These findings can also serve as a foundation for future research aimed at examining the prevalence and impact of negative mentoring experiences in undergraduate research.
This is such a big issue that needs to much more attention. As someone who is basically doing a PhD without mentorship (because my mentor is crap) a lot of the things on the list hit home. I can say without exaggerating that his way of "mentoring" is the main reason many of his current and former students are quitting academia. Doing your PhD in a "high impact" lab that is heavily ERC-funded is not enough.
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I technically had seven mentor figures throughout academia. It covered the full spectrum. There's one level below a guy who ignored all emails and scheduled meetings, but then threatened to drop me after seeing unsatisfactory progress in five months between instructions. Fortunately, I lucked out hard with my PhD adviser.