The first meeting with my grad student support group

I went to the first meeting of my graduate student support group yesterday. It’s a themed support group by the University Health Services that is moderated by a psychologist and offers a place for graduate students to discuss their experiences in a safe place. In order to get in, I had to do a phone consultation to first assess my needs, and then I had to do an in-person consultation with the group leader so that he could see if I fit the group dynamic. It was a bit more than I was expecting, but I was curious to try it out! 

Yesterday was the first meeting with everyone. There are 5 of us in total, but there is room for more people to join if they choose to over the semester. It was a lot more informal than I was expecting! It’s more of a place for us all to talk to each other and offer support, rather than a “class” setting where the moderator lectures us or gives us advice. He stepped in when we had a lag or if he had something to say, but overall it just felt pretty natural and cathartic to let things out to strangers. 

I was so nervous going into it! I wasn’t sure what other people were there for, and also if they would judge my lab environment or my struggles. But we all ended up being in pretty similar spots, and having similar desires for what we wanted to gain from the sessions (a place to vent, help with anxiety, and dealing with not-so-good environments). It was so nice to hear them talk about their experiences and to realize that I’m not alone in how I’ve been feeling. It was interesting to try and describe my situation in the lab, or at least a little bit of it, because I feel like it’s hard to get a sense of what people are like in my lab without meeting them. Describing them makes them sound like total jerks sometimes, but what makes situations so complicated is that people are multi-faceted and not just “one way” all the time, so the problems and solutions often aren’t so black and white.

I talked a bit about a co-worker of mine (K) who is very blunt and cerebral and doesn’t understand when I am sensitive about certain things, or when I’m self-conscious. He’s so hard on me sometimes that it feels humiliating, and part of me thinks that perhaps he feels like he’s being motivating by making me feel inadequate. We talked about that quite a bit actually.

One of the people in my group said a very interesting thing that I wanted to share.

He said that basically there are two types of faculty members: 

- Those that went through something in graduate school/postdoc and say: “I went through it and came out okay, so I’m going to make you go through it too.” 

- Those that went through something and say: “I went through it, and I will never make someone else go through that.”

I think that really rang true for me. Some people were motivated by fear and someone telling them they weren’t doing a good enough job, and so that’s the way they now mentor all their students. They try to light a fire under their a**es in the hopes that the student will work harder to “please” them. 

Other people realize that some students are not fear-motivated and are actually much harder on themselves already, so they don’t need you to light the fire. They need you to motivate them with passion and excitement so that they don’t get too down on themselves. 

A good mentor will adjust their mentoring style to work with the individual student. But a lot of mentors don’t have this kind of insight and just place the burden on the student to adapt and deal with it.

I think K is definitely a fear motivator, in the sense that if you don’t know something and you ask him a question, he will kind of make you feel stupid for not knowing it. And in his mind, I think he’s trying to push me to be more independent and study harder, but he doesn’t see that I already feel stupid and he’s just confirming that insecurity within me. 

Anyway, I thought that was super interesting, and it made me feel better about my relationship with K. I was feeling bad that I was not adapting to his style, but now I know that I just have to be true to myself and do the best I can.

For all of you sensitive folks out there, I hear you and I understand your struggle. Just know that you’re not alone, and try to just remember what that student told me about why certain people mentor that way. It doesn’t mean they don’t like you, but it also doesn’t mean that you need to sit there and take whatever they throw at you. You can speak up and advocate for your needs. You may be more sensitive than others, but that doesn’t mean it’s all on you to change. You might have room to compromise, and at the very least you can understand where that mentor is coming from when they do certain things.

Queen of the Bench is a PhD candidate in Cell and Molecular Biology. This story was published on February 15, 2019, on the blog Queen of the Bench (available here) and has been republished here with permission