How can a mentor help my career? | Cell Mentor

Throughout your career, you'll hear the word "mentor" thrown around a lot. But what does this mean, in practical terms? What are the concrete benefits of building a mentor-mentee relationship, and how can it change your path through science?

That's a question that'd best answered through personal experiences.

Cell Mentor—an online resource from Cell Press and @cellsignaldotcom —empowers early-career researchers with career insights, publishing advice, and techniques on experimental processes and procedures. Now it’s even easier to tap into the knowledge and experience of experts who’ve walked in your shoes.

For more advice on how to Get Inspired, Get Technical, Get Published, and Get Hired, visit https://www.cellmentor.com/

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0:00​ How can a mentor help my career?

0:13 Claudia Willmes
Editor, Trends in Molecular Medicine

Having a good mentor is so important. I say this now, as I'm enrolled in a structured program here at Cell Press, and I realize how badly I would have needed such a mentor when I was at an earlier career stage. A mentor can help you identify your strengths, identify where you need to build further skills, and identify opportunities that can eventually become realities.

0:41 Jonathan Saxe
Senior Scientific Editor, Cell Stem Cell

A mentor can help your career in many different ways. So, a mentor can give you advice about the next step of what your career can be. If you get to know someone around the office who's familiar with your skills and what your interests are. They might be aware of other opportunities within your company or perhaps even outside of the company, they can help make connections and connect those dots and really help to provide additional information about opportunities that you may not even be aware of from your own personal perspective, it really helped give some broader advice.

1:12 Julie Sollier
Former Editor-in-Chief, Developmental Cell

A mentor can help your carrier simply by being there for you. You have to think that a mentor has probably already uncovered some of the challenges you are facing right now, and by his or her experience, you can learn. I think it's also very important to have a mentor that is not your PI, for example, so you can talk about your doubts and your future in a more candid way.

1:35 Sean Beausoleil
Senior Director, Experimental Research, Cell Signaling Technology

I'd actually argue that you need more than one mentor. In my case, as I think about my career and how I've progressed, it's really required multiple mentors, I've had a great PI from grad school. So I could always turn to him for for good scientific advice and understanding more deeply scientific challenges that I'm facing. But at the same time, in industry, you're faced with other other challenges that maybe a PI in academia may not have experienced, things like managing the team dynamic, or your boss or other sort of management challenges. And so I think it really makes sense to try to draw from or build yourself up to have multiple mentors, because that will actually end up benefiting you dramatically in the end.

2:29 Ruth Zearfoss
Editor-in-Chief, Cell Reports Methods

A mentor can be a very valuable asset. From my perspective, the most valuable function of a mentor would be someone who could provide you with honest feedback, someone who you will feel comfortable asking any question about your career, about your career transitions, and just your thoughts in general. Someone who you would trust to give you honest feedback and honest advice from their personal experience. A lot of times, as you're progressing through the ranks in your career, we all are kind of hesitant to ask questions to people, and the longer I work, the more I see that the more questions you ask, the easier things are for you because you are prepared for the next step.

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