To boost mentorship, boost the incentives

In physics academia, certain faculty priorities are rewarded over others. Research? Great. Grant funding? Excellent. Mentorship? That’s nice, I suppose. Mentorship is frequently an afterthought, relegated to minor lines on performance rubrics, despite its crucial role in supporting young physicists like me.

I am the first person in my family to earn a bachelor’s degree in physics, and the first to pursue a doctorate in the field. I’m proud of both, but I accomplished neither alone: Excellent mentors guided me through the trials and triumphs of my education.

Some of my early mentors were my undergraduate physics professors, who gave me the confidence to pursue a Ph.D. My professors connected me to research opportunities, wrote strong recommendation letters even though I struggled on the physics GRE, and supported my breaks from research when I needed them. When I doubted myself, my professors saw my potential and believed I could be successful.

Mentorship helps students of all backgrounds. But for students from groups underrepresented in physics, like women and Black, Indigenous, and Hispanic students, mentorship is especially crucial. According to research from the American Institute of Physics, women and underrepresented students who left the physics major tended to have fewer encouraging interactions with professors, and they interacted less with professors outside of class. A study from George Mason University on women’s sense of belonging in physics found that faculty mentorship helps students feel more confident and positive about their physics experience.

Why is mentorship missing in many departments? Lack of training is a factor. Faculty may be experts in quantum mechanics or cosmology, but far fewer are formally taught mentorship.

But basic incentives are at play, too. Physics professors have many responsibilities, including grant writing, conducting and publishing research, and teaching courses — duties that tend to be heavily weighted in the normal processes of academic promotion. By contrast, while many tenure review guidelines mention mentorship, these mentions tend to be vague. The implication is that mentorship is not a “serious” part of a professor’s responsibilities.

If mentorship does not earn faculty the rewards that research does, even well-intentioned professors — already struggling in cutthroat academia — tend to deprioritize mentorship.

This stacks the deck against students, but it’s no picnic for certain faculty either. As some professors drop mentorship for more professionally fruitful duties, a small number pick up the slack — and this work tends to fall on the shoulders of faculty from underrepresented groups. I saw this firsthand in my own department, when just two faculty members — both women — worked for years to establish a mentoring group.

If departments are serious about their wish to educate and retain more students, especially women and students of color, they must get serious about mentorship. Plenty of tips and tricks exist for individual mentors — encourage a growth mindset, show genuine concern, and keep your mentees plugged into larger communities. But individual efforts must be accompanied by bigger department shifts. Here are three of them.

Measuring mentorship

Physicists are trained to measure things. Why not measure mentorship? It’s needed: At many universities, performance review processes ask faculty to list the number of students they supervise — a metric that says little about mentorship quality and impact.

Better metrics exist, including, per a 2019 National Academies report, evaluations of mentorship quality by both mentee and mentor, mentees’ placement into jobs, and “whether the mentored scientists are coauthors on manuscripts and grants.”

In the same way that data and methodology is discussed openly in physics labs, so too should mentorship approaches — challenges, successes, and ideas for improvement. By bringing these conversations out of the shadows, strategies for effective mentorship can become a normal part of day-to-day conversations in physics departments.

Rewarding mentorship

For many mentors, supporting young scientists is satisfying work — but to improve mentorship department-wide, stronger external incentives must exist.

Many schools recognize mentors with specific awards, like Virginia Tech or the University of Georgia. APS recognizes excellent mentorship in physics with prizes like the Narain Mentoring Award. These awards are a positive step, but mentoring must also be a larger part of performance, promotion, and tenure reviews. A tenure packet might include, among other things, a mentor’s learning resources or completed workshops, evidence of mentees’ placement into roles or jobs they want, and mentoring evaluation metrics measured over time.

Even funding agencies are elevating the value of mentorship. For example, the National Science Foundation recently updated its research grant applications, requiring principal investigators to outline how they plan to provide mentorship for postdocs and graduate students. If other funding agencies start requiring similar guidelines for grant applications, professors can incorporate mentoring more easily into their responsibilities.

Sharing mentorship

The work of mentorship is often distributed unevenly among physics faculty, but there are thoughtful approaches to even out these responsibilities. The mentoring program at George Mason University, called Spectrum, models one such approach. Founded by students in the physics and astronomy department, the program uses a mentoring structure it calls a “constellation,” a mentor group consisting of one or two faculty members and a group of students at different career stages.

A network like this more evenly distributes the responsibility of mentorship, preventing any one person from doing the heavy lifting — and for many students, it’s a more effective and enduring form of network. The program also emphasizes principles of access, justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion in its teaching, aiming to reduce imposter syndrome and build a greater sense of belonging.

Departments can also help students look beyond their institutions for help when it’s needed. For example, the APS National Mentoring Community connects Black, Latino, and Indigenous students with physicists at any career level and in any field. Mentors and mentees have access to workshops, resources, and strategies to get the most from the community.

Moving the needle

When I reflect on my career in physics, I feel lucky that my mentors were there to help me succeed. As I have heard from other young physicists — and as research shows — not all students have the same good fortune.

While mentorship is rarer in physics than it should be, physics departments can apply research-backed strategies to give mentorship the boost it needs. But the status quo is easy, and culture change is hard. Department leaders must also have the will to make these shifts. If they do, they can become champions of strong mentorship — and reap the benefits it will have on the next generation of physicists and the field we all love.

The views expressed in interviews and in opinion pieces, like the Opinion page, are not necessarily those of APS. APS News welcomes letters responding to these and other issues.