Mentorship

Ev Fedorenko’s Mentorship Statement

[a lab manual, which covers these issues, and other lab-related issues, is available upon request; evelina9@mit.edu]

Summary: The two strongest drivers in my professional life are scientific discovery and training a new generation of young scientists who ask big questions and tackle them with requisite rigor. I believe that mentorship is a core and inextricable ingredient of doing science right, and I am deeply committed to being a good mentor to every member of my lab. I aim for a ‘family’ model in my lab: I try to keep the number of core members at or below ~10 and to foster close, warm relationships among all members. If you end up in my lab, I will always do my best to provide you with all the support (professional, financial, and personal) that you need to move on to your next career stage, and will keep supporting you after you leave the lab.

Below, I summarize the basic features of my mentoring style, and then highlight what I perceive to be my strengths and weaknesses as a mentor. There are a number of lab alumni who have kindly agreed to be contacted (see the Alumni section here: Family): feel free to write to them (or reach out to current lab members) to ask more about my mentoring style and the lab culture / climate in general.


Key Features:


What I see as my goal as a mentor:
  1. For postdocs, my role is to help you develop your existing research program further, or to help you build up a new research program by providing training in a new area, on a new approach, etc., and to eventually help you get a faculty (or other) position.
  2. For graduate students, my role is to help you develop a successful research program, and to eventually help you get a postdoc/faculty position, or to support you as you explore alternative career options.
  3. For RAs (research assistants) / post-bacs, my role is to prepare you for graduate school, so that you can get accepted into one or more PhD programs that you are excited about, and to find a suitable faculty mentor to guide you in your PhD journey.
  4. For UROPs (undergraduates in the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program), my role is to facilitate you getting research experience.

(An important point to emphasize: I realize that not everyone ends up pursuing an academic path in the end, and that is absolutely fine. I will work with you to help you figure out whether academia is the right path for you, and if not, to help you decide on an alternate path.)


Mentoring style:
  1. I know in detail about all the projects going on and am deeply engaged in all the stages of research, from design and developing the experimental materials / paradigm, to data collection and analysis, to interpretation and writing. To construe mentoring in terms of Marr's levels of analyses, I would say my mentoring covers the computational and algorithmic levels of a project, and I leave the implementation level to you (I will help however I can, but in practice, you will mostly learn about the technical side of things from other labbies :) ).
  2. All postdocs, graduate students, and full-time RAs/post-bacs are supervised directly by me; undergraduate students are typically supervised by postdocs and Ph.D. students, but have a chance to interact with me as well (during lab meetings, project meetings, etc.). For postdocs and graduate students, it is quite common to have another co-mentor (typically, another faculty in the department—our lab collaborates with several other labs; sometimes, outside of the department/MIT).
  3. I meet with postdocs and graduate students individually once every two weeks for check-ins (if this is not sufficient, additional meetings are scheduled on an as-needed basis). I meet with full-time RAs/post-bacs as a group every two weeks. I meet with undergraduates on an as-needed basis. In addition to these check-in meetings, I meet with different sets of labbies regularly about various ongoing projects. In general, in spite of the many demands on my time, I will always make time to meet with you.
  4. People are different: some work highly independently, others require lots of input; some like frequent brief check-ins, others prefer less frequent more substantive meetings; some know right away what research questions they find exciting, others take a while to figure it. I will work with each of you individually to help figure out what form of mentorship is most helpful to you, and I will do my best to provide it for you.
  5. I deeply care about each lab member on a personal level. Different aspects of personal life impact the work you do, so if personal problems arise, I will do all I can to help you find resources to resolve them.

Things I value the most:
  1. Hard work. I work hard and I expect everyone in the lab to work hard. Hard work comes in many forms and styles (read: it’s not about some required number of hours per week), but I do expect you to show real commitment to and passion for research (or, as noted above, if you decide academia is not quite the right choice for you, I will do my best to help you figure out an alternative). I am also flexible in accommodating people’s individual needs, including letting them work around their family / childcare obligations and health issues, physical or mental. (Feel free to reach out to any of the current labbies (see here: Family) to ask about the lab culture / climate if you have any questions or concerns.)
  2. A side note: Because I had a difficult life growing up, I sometimes have difficulty empathizing with people who complain about how challenging graduate school / academia is. Whereas I do recognize the many challenges that one faces as an academic, especially early on in one’s career and especially if you are not a white man, but I also want people to recognize that this is an extremely privileged life.

  3. Good, quick, and clear communication. Good communication is extremely important. Because of the way I run the lab, there are dozens of projects/papers that I am working on at any given time. I organize my life and my to-do lists around email. This makes quick responses to emails essential (I generally expect a reply to my emails within a day).

Projects:

We are a large-bandwidth lab in spite of being relatively small in size: there are numerous (on the order of ~100) projects going on at any given time (of course, the structure of the projects is hierarchical, such that most group into 8-10 big clusters). These projects cover a broad range of questions about the language system and use a range of methodologies. Whether new members join ongoing projects, come with their own projects, or design a project jointly with me depends on your career stage, interests, skills, and ambitions. Because I am interested in (almost) all aspects of the language system (and its relationship with other mental capacities), I always welcome ideas for new questions to tackle. One core feature of how I run the lab is that everyone leads and/or is involved in multiple projects. Science is unpredictable: many experiments don’t work / don’t yield clear and interpretable results, or fail for other reasons; if you are pushing on several fronts at once, something will work out. In general, the ability to multi-task and switch among several ongoing projects—in terms of research questions/topics, approaches, and types of activities (e.g., designing an experiment, collecting data, writing, etc.)—provides good training for an academic career, which places diverse demands on individuals.


Collaboration among lab members:

We are a highly collaborative lab. You will learn most of what you learn in the lab (especially, on the technical side of things) from other labbies. I expect all of you to be willing to share your knowledge and expertise with others in the lab.


Funding:

If I accept you to the lab, that means I commit to funding you. I always encourage students and postdocs to apply to fellowships—those help both me (by lowering the financial burden) and you (by strengthening your CV).


Strengths and weaknesses:


I see the following as my strengths:

  • creating a warm, welcoming, and supportive environment;
  • instilling the importance of rigor in scientific research;
  • planning projects well and helping people bring projects to completion;
  • being available to my labbies.

  • The following are things that I continuously work on and try to improve on:

  • because I tend to get close to my labbies, I sometimes find it hard to offer critical feedback;
  • I can get impatient if I don’t get quick replies to my emails.

  • Commitment to diversity:

    I am deeply committed to increasing diversity in the field of language research and cognitive neuroscience more broadly. I have trained and am continuing to train women and other URMs. You can read our lab’s diversity statement here: Diversity.