Making the most of meetings with your mentor

Your graduate research adviser is a key player in your journey to graduation. In my experience, everyone has a slightly different relationship with their mentor, including how often they meet. This week, I’m diving into how to make meetings with your mentor useful and productive.

How often should I meet with my mentor?

Different meeting schedules work for different people. My graduate school mentor didn’t establish a formal meeting schedule with me, but we’d meet at least once every other week. He also had an open-door policy, so it was easy to stop in to ask questions or get feedback. My postdoc mentor, on the other hand, had weekly meetings with everyone in the lab.

Several of my graduate school classmates had scheduled meetings like this with their mentors. This can help keep consistent dialogue going about a project or your graduation timeline. If you have an adviser who’s extra busy, meetings may be less frequent, say monthly, or may be supplemented by meetings with senior members of the lab.

Try to think about what kind of meeting schedule works for you — do you like to have feedback and input at multiple stages throughout a project? Would you prefer to meet only about major issues? While your adviser may have a preferred meeting schedule, don’t hesitate to ask to change it up to ensure your needs are met and you can move your projects forward.

You should also take note of meeting frequency when you’re doing lab rotations. Your rotation will provide insight into how available the principal investigator is, based on how often they meet with you and with the graduate students who have already joined the group.

What should I talk about in my meetings?

Meeting styles vary. Most of my meetings with my graduate school mentor were informal, and it was largely up to me to guide the conversations. Meetings with my postdoc mentor were more structured. I would typically prepare a few slides about my progress on each project and would include my current data as well as a summary of any issues. This helped focus the meeting so I could get quick feedback on results and address any problems early on.

You can ask your mentor how they prefer meetings to be structured or try to structure the meeting in a way that makes sense for you. Maybe you think preparing slides for a meeting is too cumbersome and prefer to just share results in your notebook. Or maybe the structure of slides is helpful for staying on task. Consider how you like to communicate and what kind of feedback you want to receive.

If you and your mentor typically meet over Zoom or another video platform instead of in person, that might influence how you communicate, especially if you want to share data or results. A number of digital tools exist that can make this kind of communication easier (I’m specifically thinking of digital lab notebooks and slideshows). 

How can I take advantage of meeting time?  

Unless your mentor has a specific way they want to run meetings, it will largely be up to you to take advantage of your time with them. Here’s what worked for me — it may not work for everyone, but the general structure can be adapted and personalized.

I always brought up my high priority items first. This could be anything from a conference abstract due in three days to a form I needed signed for graduation. I started with the straightforward and important administrative tasks just in case data discussions went long.

I would then give a high-level overview of the projects I was working on, including a brief report on any students I was mentoring. This was often as simple as saying a particular project was still on track with no updates. I would also use this time to gently remind my mentor about anything they were holding up (like emailing that collaborator back or ordering new reagents).

I would spend the rest of the time talking about specific data or challenges. If I had exciting results or data, I’d start with that and then move on to other progress. This would end up being the meat of the meeting with the most discussion and critical thinking. If time ran out before we discussed everything, I’d use my judgment to decide if the remaining topics warranted a follow-up meeting or email, or if they could wait until the next meeting.

There are many ways to successfully communicate. Finding what works for you can help ensure you make the most of time spent with your mentor.