What do students really get out of REU’s?

Hello. I’m a freshly pressed Bachelor’s in A Hard Science and I’m new here to Tenure, She Wrote. I’m here to provide some fresh perspective from the smol side of academia–namely, how my experiences in undergrad have shown me what we need to change in Everyday Academia.

I’m here to share some stories about everyone’s favorite Thing That Looks CV Impressive–the REU.

 

REU’s (Research Experience for Undergrads) are typically touted as these absolutely amazing internships–the Rolls Royces of summer research. Us students supposedly get good (for students) salary, amazing mentorship, and the chance to come into our own as researchers by doing our own projects away from a home institution.

As someone who has been through two REU’s and an international exchange, let me tell you how much that isn’t true.

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An elephant in the room: how we set ourselves up to be bad at mentoring

If there’s one thing I hope you take away from this post, it is that the most important component of mentorship is self-awareness.

But before we get to that, I want to start out by saying that I have had to provide myself with all of the training that it takes to become, to be honest, an actively good mentor. I think that needing to self-train on mentorship is common, as it is not one of those things that are usually taught as part of grad school. Especially in STEM (which is where I do most of my work) you’re lucky if your program is forward-thinking enough to give you the basic training of how to instruct undergraduates as a TA. Personally? My starting place for my self-training in mentorship has been “Mentees should not experience harm as a result of interacting with or being trained by me”.

The purpose of this post is not to provide a template for mentorship, but to first point out some underlying assumptions that allow us mentors—usually inadvertently!—harm our mentees. And then to provide a few examples of what toxic behaviors can be, and what non-toxic alternatives are.

Can you be physically incompatible with a career?

For all that academia is a ‘brainy’ pursuit, many disciplines also rely on an impressive array of motor skills and physical abilities. Perhaps you need to be able to carry those archaeological samples out of a desert canyon, or you need to be able to dissect a fruit fly’s brain under a microscope. I remember an old Grey’s Anatomy episode where a resident was dismissed for not having a surgeon’s “hands”.  In an ideal world we could surmount, bypass, or move any physical barriers to our academic dreams – but is that always realistic?

Sometimes it just means altering one’s expectations. In one of my prior research positions I mentored a student with cerebral palsy. The project they worked on required many different abilities that I took for granted in myself and other students – the ability to perform precise measurements quickly, walk long distances quickly, and enter data quickly (you are probably seeing a pattern here). Ultimately he could do 95% of what all of the other students could, it just took him a bit more time and effort. In the end his project went so well he came back for a second summer, and it was a rewarding experience for both of us… he on track for a successful career in science.

Guest Post: The Banality of Toxicity

My personal statement glows with enthusiasm. My commitment to neglected infectious disease and immunology, and thus academia, is abundantly clear. At twenty-one I am confident my self-declared global citizenship would be unappreciated in the sterile cubes of industry. At twenty-two, before leaving the hallowed halls of elite undergraduate studies, I am self-assured a PhD is the best way to become a game-changing expert in a world of inequitable health care. At twenty-four, mid-way though preliminary exams, I feel the same. My twenty-third year, I did not. What was different that year, was who I considered my mentor.

I was a mentor for the first time in 7^th grade. I was bad at it. The guidance counsellors saw the obvious maturity differences between the newly arrived 6^th graders and the departing 8^th graders at our junior high school and devised a mentorship program to create a stronger community. While I can explain a lot of my shortcomings in the program by my universally shared social discomfort and the internal conflict between my desires to academically excel and rebel, my lack of training certainly didn’t help.

Guest Post: Quitting a PhD

It’s been over a year since I decided to quit my PhD. There are so many things I’ve learnt from reflecting on what made me feel like such a failure, and many things I wished I knew at the time.

The most important thing to realize if you are thinking about quitting a PhD for any reason is YOU ARE NOT A FAILURE. This is the feeling that stuck with me the longest and is really counterproductive to making any decisions about quitting and what you might do after. There are so many reasons to abandon a PhD, all of them legitimate, and none of them are failures. I mostly conquered this thought of failure through realizing that I am not the first, nor will I be the last PhD student to move on.