“I have grown professionally, I have got acquainted with a mentor that I can completely trust, who has enormous experience to share, and has a balanced outlook on things. She is also very frank, and she appreciates my small victories.”
—Semonti Bhattacharyya (mentee)
FLEET provides mentoring to personnel across all career stages (such as PhD students and early- and mid-career researchers) covering areas such as induction, career advancement and planning, equity and diversity, professional development, entrepreneurship and research leadership skills.
Two mentoring models are offered:
- Individual, goal-oriented mentoring, where members are individually matched to a mentor within FLEET based on their needs, for example, guiding application for promotion, grant writing or providing career advice
- Group mentoring via training sessions, for example, on manuscript preparation, grant writing, scientific presentation and research leadership.
Participation of senior members as mentors is high, with 90% of our chief investigators being a mentor. However only 25% of scientific associate investigators and 10% of partner investigators are mentoring FLEET ECRs and students, and we would like to improve this.
“I’ve found it valuable to have a mentor who can indicate whether research-related issues I am going through are normal or not.”
—Bernard Field (mentee)
Participation of our members as mentees also needs improvement: only 51% of FLEET students and 43% of research fellows are mentees in a FLEET mentoring program.
FLEET continues to improve its mentor program, guided by surveying participants.
Mentees have typically indicated their mentor relationship enabled a distinct social connection – often outside the tightly-bonded network of the physics discipline – with whom they could share experiences. Their mentor provided balance and perspective on their career, problems in their own research and on bigger picture issues affecting their lives.
Constructive feedback from participants has suggested more formal guidance and training for mentors and mentees might help build more genuine and effective relationships and improve the intended outcomes, such as expanding mentee skill sets and career decision-making.
”It is good to share experiences. The FLEET mentor program is a good support network – particularly in a year like 2020.”
—Kirrily Rule (mentor)
FLEET members access a number of mentoring programs, including:
- External mentor programs (7 members)
- Early-career researcher mentoring (45 members)
- Industry mentoring (2 members)
- Academic mentoring (11 members)
- Women in FLEET mentoring (13 members).
—this is an extract from the 2020 FLEET annual report [read the full report online]