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Find a mentor
Are you looking for a mentor, but don’t know where to start?
Exhausted your local networks or just can’t find a mentor who is a match for what you’re looking for at the moment? Here you’ll find some tips to help you find a mentor to support you and your career plans.
Key takeaways
Be clear on what your needs are and what you want to get from a mentoring relationship.
Don’t be afraid to seek mentors in other faculties, universities, or disciplines. Sometimes the best mentoring can come from the unique perspectives outside of your field.
Finding a mentor can be as simple as asking someone for a coffee and a chat.
Formal mentoring programs can be an excellent way of finding a mentor and have the benefit of a defined structure and support along the way.
Read time: 6 min
What is your key need?
Before considering where to find a mentor, it is important to reflect on what it is you need at this moment, or what you want a mentor to help you with.
Are you at a stage where you are looking for someone to help you navigate the academic promotion process, or do you need a mentor who can help you juggle academia with parenthood? Do you need a mentor who you can bounce ideas off as you continue your own research trajectory or supervising your first PhD student?
If you need help identifying your goals, complete the Career Planning Workbook (pdf, 120 KB) (UniKey required).
Tips for choosing a mentor
1. Find a mentor who is not your immediate supervisor or manager
Your current supervisor or manager can offer you advice or support, and certainly they can take a mentoring-type approach in your work together. However, a mentor should ideally be independent at least one step removed from your immediate area. This will minimise conflicts of interests and give you a fresh perspective, particularly if your career or research goals differ from your current work.
2. Don’t limit yourself to finding a mentor within the same university or even the same field
You may be tempted to find a mentor who has your exact expertise or has familiarity with your research area, but some of the most fruitful mentoring relationships have been forged between mentors and mentees in different disciplines. You can gain useful insights and new and unique perspectives from people in different fields, and it will also help you to build up useful inter-/multi-disciplinary connections that are crucial in academia today.
In addition, a mentor outside of your field or university can remove any potential conflicts of interest and provide you with more impartial advice about tricky situations occurring within your own area. You also might feel more comfortable being candid about interpersonal challenges.
3. It's OK to consider personal qualities or life experiences
It is very common for people to prefer a mentor of a particular gender or with specific life experiences, like juggling research and parenting, previous career disruptions, or being a researcher with disability.
You can also think about the personal qualities that make you most comfortable or best support your goals. Are you looking for someone who is direct and firm, who might push you to take that next step? Or, do you prefer someone with a more gentle and empathic approach?
If you’re part of a structured mentoring program and you’re being paired with a mentor, it can be helpful to advise the organisers of any strong preferences.
4. Consider mentors a few steps ahead
Academics who are one or two steps ahead of you in their career can also be a great choice as a mentor because their recent personal and professional experiences may be closer to your own. This may enable more empathy with your situation and allow them to offer more pertinent advice or examples, depending on your goal.
5. Your PhD supervisor can be a mentor, but be aware that mentoring is different to supervision
Your former PhD supervisor can be a good choice for a mentor – after all, they know you and your work better than most – but keep in mind that a mentoring relationship is very different to one between a supervisor and supervisee. It’s important to have clear communication about goals, expectations at the outset to mitigate any issues.
As a PhD candidate, your supervisor was there to guide and support you with the task of researching and writing a thesis. Mentoring, on the other hand, is about developing your own career more broadly and not typically on a specific task or outcome. As you gain more experience after your PhD, you will begin to forge more independence as a researcher and your own research niche. One major challenge with having a former PhD supervisor as a mentor is that it can be difficult to break away from the more hands-on supervisor-supervisee relationship towards one of mutual benefit seen in mentoring.
Advice from University of Sydney researchers
Ways to find a mentor
Informally
Finding a mentor can be as simple as asking a senior colleague for a coffee to chat about a particular topic or issue you might be facing. Think about your goals for mentoring, and list people you already know who have experience in that area, including people you’ve met, or seen speaking, at conferences or events. Was there anyone you clicked with?
Network at conferences
Conferences are a great opportunity to network with researchers in your field, but also to find a mentor who might help you with the next stages of your career. If you meet with and connect with someone at a conference, be sure to reach out to them afterwards via email or social media to ensure you remain on their radar.
Use your existing connections or networks
Another way to find a mentor is to make use of your existing contacts. If there is a specific area you want to develop or work on, do you know any colleagues who might have suitable contacts? If so, reach out to them and ask if they know of anyone who could help or if they could set up an introduction for you.
When doing this, ask about people who have mentored before or who could be good at offering you the help and support you are looking for in a mentor. Word of mouth and a good recommendation can be enormously helpful in narrowing down who to approach.
Matched mentoring programs
There are a number of programs available to you within and outside of the University, which formalise the process of finding and working with a mentor. These can be beneficial as they provide introductions to mentor/mentee pairs and are often focused on a particular type of development. Most, but not all, formal mentoring programs come with a predefined structure and some also give you resources to help plan your goals and structure your conversations and meetings.
Some mentoring programs are listed below, and also explore our dynamic catalogue of career development opportunities at the University of Sydney.
Drawbacks of formal programs
Because formal mentoring programs often involve mentor/mentee matching by a third party, it is not uncommon to find that the relationship just isn't quite a 'fit'. These things can be a matter of chemistry, after all. If you find yourself in a pairing that doesn't feel right or that seems like it isn't going to meet your needs, first ask yourself if there is a way you can adapt or be clearer about what you want out of the relationship. If that doesn't work, or if you are assigned a mentor who is unresponsive (it's rare, but it happens!), it's OK to advise the program organisers who can sometimes re-match you.
Mentoring programs
Example internal programs
Mentoring within a career and leadership development program for Level B staff who identify as women.
Mentoring for staff who identify as having a disability. Two mentoring streams for (1) providing guidance to staff new to the University or (2) staff looking to further their career aspirations.
6-month mentoring program for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander staff to progress career plans and leadership aspirations.
External programs
International and intercultural opportunities for the empowerment, professional growth, and development of aspiring women leaders within the Association of Pacific Rim Universities (APRU).
Mentoring program to encourage and facilitate transnational mobility in researchers between Europe and the rest of the world.