How (Not) to Run an Academic Research Group—Insights on Mentoring and Work-Life Balance

Running a research group and mentoring students is not something that we are explicitly trained to do during our graduate studies. At best, we spend five plus years observing how our Ph.D. or postdoc advisors do it, making a long mental list of what to do (and what definitely NOT to do) along the way. As a non-expert on this subject, my goal is to help you avoid some of the many pitfalls that I encountered, by telling you what worked and what didn’t work for me. I’ll discuss the realities of work-life balance, and the implications of being both “mom” and “professor”. Effective time management skills are certainly a critical requirement for reaching a semblance of equilibrium. However, even with the best laid plans, there are inevitably gaps between how I <i>plan</i> to spend my time (e.g., revising and submitting a manuscript) and how I <i>actually</i> spend my time (e.g., zoom meetings while entertaining a sick toddler who had to stay home from daycare). I’ll discuss how my group management and mentoring approach has evolved over the past six years of my career thanks to trial-and-error and a good deal of “mentoring up” from my endlessly-patient students, and I’ll share the toolkit that I’ve developed in an effort to foster a diverse, self-driven, collegial, and growth-oriented research group.