Mentoring and Inclusion

A personal statement by Sam

These are my personal views and do not reflect those of my employer.

As a Black woman in America, systemic inequity has permeated every facet of my life for as long as I can remember, and academia is no different. Housing discrimination, predatory lending, biased policing, and medical racism are but a few examples from my life. I know first hand that systems, laws, and policies are differentially applied across groups, creating structural differences that oppress people on the basis of who they are. This lived experience contextualizes how I perceive, and am perceived by, the dominant academic culture, which is a culture of white supremacy.

As a professional, I am in a position of triple jeopardy - I am Black; I am a woman; I am a mother. I embody Black expertise within a system and a national culture that broadly considers expertise to be mutually exclusive with those traits. This way of thinking pervades academia as an institution, and thus it is often assumed to be natural or unavoidable that those who do not hail from the dominant group (white, cis-gendered, male, high socioeconomic status) will fail to thrive in their careers. This assumption changes interpersonal dynamics, resource allocation, and mentoring of persons excluded due to ethnicity or race (PEERs), along the career path from high school to graduate school and beyond, contributing to lack of representation. Whether this is intentional or not is irrelevant. Either way, the current academic culture is effective in producing, reinforcing and sustaining discrimination.

Because systemic inequity is ubiquitous, I believe that constant, aggressive repudiation across scales and sectors is the way to combat it. This is why I seek to foster change at the local, regional, national and global levels.

The Lewis lab mentoring philosophy

I believe that when done well, mentoring helps people to understand themselves better and use that information to improve their professional performance and personal happiness. I expect that mentoring relationships will be specific to the individuals involved, be bidirectional, and will change over time.

I consider individuality when establishing a mentoring relationship, because I find that people like to be mentored in different ways. This extends from the practical (frequency of meetings) to the emotional (comfort discussing feelings), to the aspirational (industry, academic or alternative careers). As a mentee, I once chafed under the supervision of a mentor who assumed that I had the same professional goals they did, and that I would seek to replicate their career trajectory. There wasn’t space to take a different route. The weight of their expectations led me to question whether academic science was right for me. I learned that blanket mentoring, no matter how enthusiastic, can do more harm than good.

My mentorship philosophy drives me to tailor the culture of my laboratory to the individuals I lead, and to do so by enacting approaches developed by scholars of othering and belonging.

I invite members of the lab to collectively discuss and agree upon shared values which guide our daily interactions, our approach to conflict resolution, and our approach to science. Some of these are described below:

• We strive to know ourselves- structural inequities affect all of us, thus we all dedicate ourselves to continually learning, including the PI. This also means that we support each other by noting transformative changes amongst the group as we build up our strengths.

• We are transparent with one another- we avoid pretending to know something when we don’t, and we choose not to ignore small issues or discrepancies so that they don’t fester and grow. When we need to have a difficult conversation, we are direct with each other.

• We take risks and learn from mistakes- we recognize that mistakes are inevitable in interpersonal dynamics, and we acknowledge them when they happen. What is important is that we learn and try again. We accept that perfectionism is incompatible with this process.

These equity principles provide a foundation to challenge our baseline conditioning about how academic culture should operate while maintaining personal boundaries. In my opinion, they are also the foundation for transformative scientific discovery: dedication to continual learning, teamwork, clarity about what we really know versus speculation, scientific rigor, and willingness to try risky new approaches.