LW - Picking Mentors For Research Programmes by Raymond D

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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Picking Mentors For Research Programmes, published by Raymond D on November 10, 2023 on LessWrong.
Several programmes right now offer people some kind of mentor or supervisor for a few months of research. I participated in SERI MATS 4.0 over the summer, and I saw just how different people's experiences were of being mentored. So this is my list of dimensions where I think mentors at these programmes can differ a lot, and where the differences can really affect people's experiences.
When you pick a mentor, you are effectively trading between these dimensions. It's good to know which ones you care about, so that you can make sensible tradeoffs.
Your Role as a Mentee
Some mentors are mostly looking for research engineers to implement experiments for them. Others are looking for something a bit like research assistants to help them develop their agendas. Others are looking for proto-independent researchers/research leads who can come up with their own useful lines of research in the mentor's area.
I saw some people waver at the start of the programme because they expected their mentors to give them more direction. In fact, their mentors wanted them to find their own direction, and mentors varied in how clearly they communicated this. Conversely, I got the sense that some people were basically handed a project to work on when they would have liked more autonomy.
I think this relates to seniority: my rough impression was that the most junior mentors were more often looking for something like collaborators to help develop their research, while more senior ones with more developed agendas tended to either want people who could execute on experiments for them, or want people who could find their own things to work on. But this isn't an absolute rule.
Availability
Engagement: Some mentors came into the office regularly. Others almost never did, even though they were in the Bay Area. Concretely, I think even though my team had a mentor on another continent, we weren't in the bottom quartile of mentorship time.
Nature of Engagement: It's not just how much time they'll specifically set aside to speak to you. How willing are they to read over a document and leave comments? How responsive are they to messages, and how much detail do you get? Also, some mentors work in groups, or have assistants.
Remoteness: Remoteness definitely makes things harder. You get a little extra friction in all conversations with your mentor, for starters. It's trickier to ever have really open-ended discussion with them. It's also easier to be a bit less open about your difficulties - if they can't ever look in your office then they can't see if you're not making progress, and it is very natural to want to hide problems. Personally, I wish we'd realised sooner that we had more scope for treating our mentor as more of a collaborator and less of a boss we needed to send reports to, and I think being remote made this harder.
A caveat here is that you can still talk to other mentors and researchers in person, which substitutes for some of the issues. But it is obviously not quite the same.
What you get from your mentor
If you're an applicant anxiously wondering whether you'll even be accepted, it can be hard to notice that your mentor is an actual real human with their own personality. They will have been selected far more for their research than for their mentoring. So naturally different mentors will actually have very different personalities, strengths, and weaknesses.
Supportiveness: Some mentors will be more supportive and positive in general. Others might not offer praise so often, and it might feel more disheartening to work with them. And some mentees are fine without praise, but others really benefit from mentor encouragement.
High Standards: Some mentors are more laid back, others will have higher ...