Chapter 10. Mentoring others, when you become the expert
The mentor assumes that the student’s starting point is closer to their own than it is...
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There is a specific moment in a research career that arrives earlier than you expect. You are sitting across from a student who has just shown you their first real attempt at a method you have been running for years, and you can see immediately that the approach is wrong, the logic has a gap, and the figure they are most proud of tells a story they have not actually earned yet from the data.
The student is looking at you with the particular expression of someone who has worked hard and wants to know if it was enough. I remember being that student. I remember the specific weight of showing work to someone who knew more than I did and waiting to find out if I was on the right track or had wasted a month.
I remember the supervisors and senior researchers who gave me good + positive feedback, which was direct and honest. The good thing is that they never made me feel that the gap between where I was and where I needed to be was too large to cross.
In the opposite direction, I also remember the ones who said nothing useful. Who either told me everything was fine when it was not, or who responded to my uncertainty with a kind of impatience that communicated that my not already knowing the answer was an inconvenience to them.
That second kind of experience is more common than it should be, and it shapes how the next generation of scientists learns to treat the people who come after them.
For most of your research career, the primary communication task is receiving. You receive information from supervisors, feedback from reviewers, guidance from collaborators, and direction from the structure of the field itself. The skills that matter most in that phase are about
Getting what you need,
Asking the right questions
Making sense of information
Rinse and repeat
At some point that changes. The direction of knowledge transfer reverses, and you become the person who knows what the path actually looks like. A junior PhD student asks you a question that you answered for yourself five years ago. A colleague needs honest feedback on a piece of work. Someone at the beginning of their career is trying to understand whether the research job market is as difficult as they have heard, and they are asking you because you have been inside it long enough to know.
This transition does not come with a formal announcement. Most people step into it gradually, mentoring informally before they have any official title or responsibility, and they carry into it whatever communication habits they developed on the receiving end of mentorship, good and bad. You can be brilliant at absorbing guidance from someone who knows more than you and still be genuinely terrible at giving it. Why ? Well, because giving guidance requires you to model where another person is rather than where you are, and that is a much harder act of translation than most people expect.
How to feedback without discouraging people
The most common failure mode in mentoring feedback involves one thing:
Vagueness in service of comfort
When someone shows you work that has real problems, the temptation is to soften the feedback so thoroughly that the important message never actually arrives. The student leaves the meeting thinking the work is basically fine. The junior colleague revises in the wrong direction because they heard a tone of reassurance and not the substance of the critique. Three months later, when the problem has compounded, the feedback conversation becomes much harder than it would have been if you had been clear the first time.
Honest feedback is not the same thing as brutal feedback.
Brutal feedback identifies failure in a way that makes the person feel that the failure is who they are.
Honest feedback identifies the specific thing that is not working and communicates it in a way that makes the path forward visible.
The practical version of this is to separate the assessment from the direction. When you tell someone what is wrong, you need to also tell them what would make it right, or at minimum that a right direction exists and roughly where it is. Let’s see these 2 examples
“This figure is not telling the story your results actually support”
“This figure is not telling the story, but if you make X to Y, A to B, then C happens”
You see, 2nd option works a lot better right. If what comes after is a description of what the figure could show and how to get there, the student has something to work with. If what comes after is silence or a pivot to the next issue, you have created a problem without creating a path.
The hardest version of this is giving feedback on something that is not just technically incorrect but represents a deeper misunderstanding about how research works. Those conversations take longer. They require you to set aside whatever else you have to do that day and actually think through where the student is in their understanding and what the next step looks like. That investment is not optional if you want your feedback to be genuinely useful. It is the minimum requirement for mentorship that actually develops someone.
Let me tell you a quick story, last year, I run a Friday night livestream for Vietnamese researchers. It started without a plan, as a side thing, and has continued because the need turned out to be larger and more persistent than I expected.
A significant portion of the questions I receive are variations of the same question. Whether the research path is still worth it, given what the person asking has seen and heard. Whether the difficulty they are experiencing is normal or a sign that they are in the wrong place. Whether there is something they are missing that everyone who has made it through seems to know.
Most of the time, the answer to the third question is yes, and the thing they are missing is usually not technical. It is access to someone who will tell them honestly what the path actually looks like, without the hedging that comes when a senior researcher is trying to protect a comfortable narrative about a system they have survived.
You know, the students who get through most intact are almost always the ones who had at least one person in their corner who was genuinely honest with them early enough for it to matter.
The trick calibrate to where they are, not where you are
Here is the most common miscalibration I see in mentoring relationships, including ones I have been part of myself. It’s actually very simple:
The mentor assumes that the student’s starting point is closer to their own than it is.
When you have been running a particular type of analysis for a decade, the steps in that process are invisible to you. You no longer experience them as steps. You experience the analysis as a single coherent act with a known outcome. When a student asks you about that analysis, you need to mentally reconstruct the sequence of understanding you built over many years and figure out where in that sequence this particular student currently sits. That reconstruction is genuine intellectual work, as if you explain something clearly at your own level and then express frustration when the student does not understand.
The question:
“What does this student need to know”
kinda not working eh ? But
“What does this student currently understand, and what is the single next thing that would advance that understanding most.”
This applies differently at different stages. Early on, more direction is appropriate, because the student does not yet have a map of the terrain. Later, too much direction becomes a constraint rather than a support, because the student needs space to develop their own judgment and the experience of making decisions independently, including decisions that do not work out. Knowing when to pull back is at least as important as knowing when to guide, and most mentors steer toward too much direction because it is faster and because not offering guidance can feel like neglect even when it is actually developmental.
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