Over the course of a year, Oriana Aragon and John Dovidio have performed a study on Postdoctoral Experiences on a part of the Yale postdoc population. Here are the preliminary results shared with the participants of the study. If you haven’t had the chance to participate, we are publishing their email below.
Thank you again for participating in the Postdoctoral Experiences Survey. Your participation makes it possible for us to understand postdoctoral fellows’ experiences. The information you provided is valuable and will be useful to inform best practices, interventions, mentor training, and materials made available to both postdoctoral scholars and their advisors. Dissemination of such information and materials will be through the FAS Dean’s Office, and the Provost’s Office at Yale University. Our aim is make effective changes at Yale and beyond at other universities.
We would now like to provide you with some initial findings. Much of our focus was on what makes a mentoring relationship one of high quality. Your responses helped us to understand better what specific instructions might be offered to mentors to help them to be more effective and improve those relationships. For example, your responses made clear the critical importance of advisors’ instrumental responsiveness, which includes returning emails, being available for questions, responding with manuscript comments, and providing feedback. Instrumental responsiveness was strongly related to postdoctoral scholars’ impressions of a quality mentoring relationship with their advisor, here defined as having mutual respect, and advisors’ care for their wellbeing. We also asked you respond to profiles of different types of mentors, to understand which mentoring styles might benefit or harm perceptions of advisor-advisee relationships. Again, the finding was consistent: To be a warm or friendly advisor was not enough– instrumental responsiveness was important not only to improve scholarship but also to communicate that advisors actually cared for their advisees’ well being.
We also examined other key elements that make an advisor- advisee relationship successful. There were five basic factors promoting career advancement: (a) confidence in one’s ability to grow in knowledge and research, (b) help-seeking behaviors, (c) confidence in one’s abilities and ideas, (d) confidence that one can manage work hours well, and (e) confidence that one can maintain a work/life balance. These factors have been found in past research to be relevant to persistence, success, and retention in academia, generally. In the study in which you have been participating, higher scores on these five factors were associated with higher perceptions of a quality mentoring relationship with advisors.
Your responses also indicated that witnessing, experiencing, or even just learning about about unfair treatment of others through our materials, had a negative impact on postdocs. This impact was not only temporary discouragement but also reductions in longer-term career aspirations and motivation. Your responses are valuable in guiding us to think of ways that will help prevent unfair treatment or counteract its adverse effects, not only for the immediate target of the treatment but on others who witness or learn about it. Your input has changed the direction of some of our research. You have provided us with ideas about how to ameliorate such effects. Again, thank you for your valuable input.
To help us develop online materials that would benefit postdoctoral fellows and associates, we also asked you to rate mentoring materials and resources. There were many materials to evaluate, such as websites, videos, and proposed topics for future materials. Your cohort indicated that you would use materials on the topics of practical help with writing (particularly concerning grants), development of your ideas into viable programs of research, and that you would like to hear more about networking and the experiences of other postdocs who have moved forward from their positions. Additionally, your responses made it clear that mentoring videos can be useful. We are working now on developing more mentoring videos and making those accessible for postdocs, both at Yale and beyond. The videos used in the study will be available this coming year for all of you who asked to see them again, and for those of you who did not get a chance to see them yet. We will email you with details.
We will be contacting you as we make more materials available. We do care about you, and your futures. We may contact you again in the future with questions to see how things are going for you.
Best to you, and thank you again,
Oriana Aragón and John Dovidio