Last year, I had the opportunity to take part in the Graduate Research School Career Mentoring Program. 

Recently, I’ve reflected on what I took away from this experience and what advice I would give fellow graduate research students embarking on a new relationship with a mentor. 

Here are my four key ingredients to a beneficial mentoring relationship:

1. Choice

I’ve always felt that mentoring programs were a bit hit and miss. Sometimes, you land yourself an amazing mentor, who works in a relevant field and can share pearls of wisdom with you. Other times, you just don’t click and, despite the best of intentions from both parties, conversations can feel awkward and strained. I think the key ingredient in developing a beneficial mentoring relationship is to allow the mentee to choose their own mentor. 

This selection process was the most useful aspect of the Career Mentoring Program I did. The GRS encouraged all participants to brainstorm a list of potential mentors. Ideally, these would be people working in relevant fields outside academia whom we felt we could learn from, or at least have a series of interesting conversations with. 

Researching potential mentors gave me an insight into where PhD graduates could end up outside of academia and made me consider what types of roles appealed to me. After much deliberation, I created a list of eight potential mentors, all of whom had completed a PhD and were now working for not-for-profit organisations or local government. The GRS then reached out to my top preference to invite them to join the program.

2. Confidence

If you’re going to start a conversation with a complete stranger, in person or virtually, you’re going to need a healthy dose of confidence. Many graduate researchers struggle with imposter syndrome, and it can be difficult to get out of this head-space. My advice is to ignore those little doubts and back yourself! 

I was really nervous about connecting with my potential mentor but, to my surprise, she had already heard of me! We shared a few mutual contacts and she had learnt about my area of research on Twitter. This made me feel much more comfortable and helped to justify the many hours I have spent on social media!

3. Preparation

Before our first meeting, the graduate researcher mentees were encouraged to do some solid preparation. 

We needed to think about what topics we might like to cover with our mentor, what we could contribute to the conversation and, ultimately, what we wanted to gain from the relationship. One reason I chose my mentor was that she had moved between different fields and had developed a varied and interesting work history. I wanted to hear more about how she’d made these career jumps, such as how she had adapted her unique skills and experiences to meet different key selection criteria. I was also keen to discuss work-life balance and any tips she had for the final months of a PhD. Other students in the program took a very different approach and wanted to discuss specific areas of research or recent ‘hot topics’ in their field. Whatever your interest, being prepared for meetings is key to keep your conversations on track and to maximise face-to-face time with your mentor.

4. Commitment

As with all new relationships, managing a mentoring relationship requires a decent amount of commitment. 

During the Career Mentoring Program, the mentees were encouraged to set up a minimum of three meetings with their mentor (conducted over Zoom due to the pandemic), over the space of three months. This required writing and sending out meeting agendas, taking minutes during meetings, and scheduling upcoming Zoom calls. Students who invested more time and energy into managing their mentoring relationship seemed to get more out of the experience.

Since the GRS program officially ended, my mentor and I have stayed in touch. We felt we had a lot of common research interests and wanted to pursue these further. We invited several additional people to join the conversation and are now aiming to collaborate on a paper looking at the success of urban ecology initiatives in cities.

Everyone will come into mentoring with unique ideas, interests, and aims. But if you keep these four key ingredients in mind, you should be well on your way to forming a successful and beneficial relationship with your new mentor!

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Jacinta Humphrey is a PhD student in the Department of Ecology, Environment and Evolution, School of Life Sciences. She studies the impacts of urban development on the birds that share our suburbs. Jacinta aims to determine the relative influence of housing cover and canopy tree cover on bird diversity, community composition and the occurrence of individual species in greater Melbourne. Ultimately, she hopes to develop some recommendations for local governments and residents on how to better support native birds in our cities.

Jacinta is passionate about making urban spaces more wildlife-friendly and is always looking for new and interesting ways to communicate her science. You can follow her on Twitter as @HumphreyJE_.

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As colleagues in the GRS who coordinate mentoring opportunities for graduate researchers, we (Maria and James) have been reflecting on what mentoring might be, as well as the ways different people might orient themselves to the opportunities it offers.  In this blog post we thought we’d share some key ideas that we have found helpful in our ongoing process of learning about mentoring.

Questioning definitions


According to some dictionary definitions, a mentor is a ‘an experienced and trusted adviser’ and a mentee is ‘a person who is advised, trained, or counselled by a mentor’. These common-sense definitions make mentoring sound easy, right?  A mentor is the person with the experience, and the mentee is the one who lacks experience and engages with someone who has more of it in order to get advice. But is mentoring really that simple?

For some of us these ideas of mentoring sit uncomfortably. We might see ourselves neither as totally lacking knowledge/experience, nor as the kind of person who fully ‘owns’ expertise either. As mentors, we also might not feel like a hero-figure who is well positioned to solve someone else’s problems! This can make many of us suspicious about engaging in mentoring programs because we don’t see ourselves as clearly sitting on either side of an expert/non-expert binary.

Other people might be a bit suss about mentoring because they see it as a way of pressuring people to ‘gain new skills’ or help people who ‘don’t know enough’. For some of us this framing feels pretty daunting. The thought of engaging with someone who appears to have more expertise can bring up feelings of inadequacy. This is often compounded by the fact that the times we often feel like we need mentoring or career guidance, are also the times we are often the most vulnerable – either looking to make a transition, or having a vague sense of where we are going but being not quite sure to get there, or even the right questions to ask about how to get there.

However, there are other definitions of mentoring.

According to mentoring guru, Kay Guccione, mentoring:

can be accessed by mentees, on their terms, to enable them to make sense of the demands of their role and workload, to understand their experiences, and to move forward feeling supported.

We find ourselves thinking along similar lines.

Rather than a process whereby a heroic mentor aims to plug deficits or gaps identified by the mentee, we see mentoring as ideally a developmental process.

Re-defining mentoring as a relationship where two capable people are learning together has been a helpful way in for us. It helps us see that lots of us can benefit from mentoring, we don’t have to be ‘lacking’ in order to engage with it.

Being a mentor


The question of how to be a mentor has no easy ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answers. Like lots of other roles,  the judgements we make as mentors are up to us, and each mentor will have their own approach, style and practices. Indeed, the ways we are with some mentees might very given their needs and contexts.

Nevertheless, there are some ways of thinking about being a mentor that have been helpful for us that we would like to share.

We like what Kay Guccione says about being a mentor. She reckons that it is possible to conceive of mentoring as something other than a transactional Q&A session where the mentees bring all the questions and mentors offer all the answers. Instead, Guccione asks mentors to try and re-frame meetings from being all about the mentors.

While advice may be given and anecdotes may be shared, being a mentor is much more about being a sounding board or ‘a listener who amplifies the mentee’s voice, not their own’.

For mentors, this means helping the mentee to articulate their needs and recognising that even the process of getting things off our chest – whether there is advice supplied in return or not – can be as beneficial as the ‘advice’ itself. Rather than giving advice, the goal of the mentor can be to help to keep the mentee talking, and processing their thoughts out loud.

Being a mentee


In approaching any mentoring relationship as a mentee, we’ve also found it important to think about expectations. What do you expect from the relationship? This helps answer another question: who can you realistically hope your mentor to be?

Getting the questions and topics you want to explore clear can be a valuable first step. Are you seeking information about how to make the transition from academia to a private company or community organisation? In this case, would it be helpful to find a mentor who has taken a similar path?

Or are you looking to drill down into other questions. For example,  you might also have questions about how to manage your professional role alongside that of a parent or carer, or how to be an effective leader in your industry context.

Getting really clear about what it is you are hoping to discuss with your mentor is vital.
However, it’s also important not to get too specific!

One of the challenges we have seen when researchers anticipate mentoring is the challenge of very narrow expectations. If you set out to find a mentor who is the head of a Fortune 500 company, has previously worked in academia, is a member of the LGBTIQ community and is balancing parenting with their busy role – this is likely to be too prescriptive and may leave you disappointed when you are unable to find your ideal mentor.

When you go to your first meeting with your mentor, it is often up to the mentee to prepare a list of questions you would like to ask or topics you would like to discuss (you may like to email this to your mentor in advance). This helps the mentor to know what you would like to get out of the session. Having a structured approach is also likely to ensure the quality conversations and to help the mentor feel like they are assisting you to achieve your goals.

Bumps along the way


Mentoring relationships, like all human interactions, are often bumpy and negotiated. Sometimes expectations are not met, people don’t click, or other factors get in the way.

One of the key bumps that can occur is that mentoring is not actually what the mentee needs right now. Sometimes the mentee doesn’t have time, other times their need is more specialised than what the mentor can offer. In this case referring on to another person is the right thing to do.

Other times what can be perceived as ‘bumps’ are actually successes. Sometimes the mentee gets what they need out of the relationship much quicker than anticipated. This is a positive outcome, no need to string a mentoring relationship along if the questions that prompted it have been answered!
It is also OK to recognise when things don’t work. It may be that your mentor is just not a good fit and the match is not helping you achieve what you had hoped. In this case, you have permission to leave the mentoring relationship! However, when we exit relationships, part of the learning is figuring out how to do this with grace and generosity.

Interested to know more?


The GRS is running a mentoring program for graduate researchers. It is open to all graduate researchers who have passed confirmation and wish to explore how mentoring can help you maximise your potential.

Sign up for the mentoring program here

In order to be eligible to join the program, you must take part in GRS’ Networking and Mentoring Workshop. For 2020 this is running on 31^st March.

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Dr Maria Platt is a Senior Coordinator at the Graduate Research School. She graduated with a PhD from La Trobe University in 2011. Her work has been published in a number of journals including  Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology</i>; The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology (TAPJA) and Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific.

Dr James Burford is a Lecturer in the RED team. His research focuses on doctoral education, gender and sexuality in education, global education and international development, and academic mobilities. With Emily Henderson, he edits the academic blog, Conference Inference. He tweets as @jiaburford

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