Being a mentor you might face one of these challenges when dealing with your mentee:
- Assessing mentee's background (knowledge and skills)
- Identifying mentee's motivation
- Dealing with mentee's inexperience (knowledge and skills)
- Addressing mentee's misconceptions about science
- Setting reasonable goals for the project
- Keeping mentee engaged
- Supporting the mentee financially
- Building mentee's confidence
- Fostering mentee's independence
- Deciding on the best solution to a given mentoring challenge
- Setting limits and boundaries for the mentor/mentee relationship
- Addressing lack of planning
- Giving negative feedback to the mentee on lack of progress
- Allocating time
- Finding resources
- Remaining patient
Learn about rewards and how to handle challenges in mentoring best—Read individual commented cases in mentoring
Watch the seminar discussions on individual case scenarios in mentoring—Coming Soon!
Further Reading
Entering Mentoring: A Seminar to Train a New Generation of Scientists—Wisconsin Program for Scientific Teaching, Section 8, p. 132