Steven Spielberg once said, “The delicate balance of mentoring someone is not creating them in your own image, but giving them the opportunity to create themselves.” This has certainly been my experience mentoring graduate students over the past 40 years.
In psychology, graduate students work closely with a mentor, working alongside each other for many years, doing research, learning the history of the discipline, debating theory and methods, developing new ideas and testing them, going back to the drawing board and testing again, always understanding the provisional nature of scientific findings.
Science is a never-ending story; it is a process of both tedium and discovery, of careful observation and moments of insight. Working so closely together, often for 5 or 6 years as students work towards their PhD, mentors and graduate students develop more than an academic relationship; they become entwined in each other’s lives.
A few weeks ago, my prior graduate students honored me with a Festschrift, an academic retirement party during which students and colleagues highlight the honoree’s career—and, of course, tell stories! My students, all now success stories in their own right, told stories of research and scientific discovery as together we designed studies, collected data, interpreted results, and published papers.
Together in the Family Narratives Lab, we embarked on studies of family storytelling, of how and why families that tell more elaborated and emotionally expressive stories facilitate positive outcomes for their children and adolescents. Empirical findings from our lab—and from many other labs with which we collaborated—led to applications and interventions for families in distress, for teachers and schools, and for adolescents facing mental health challenges.
In collaboration with many other scholars, my graduate students and I demonstrated the importance of stories. In this way, science is a team effort—a story of senior scientists and trainees, post-docs and students, all working together on common goals, even as they debate and disagree.
At the Festschrift, my students also told more personal stories, stories that built our relationship. Stories of annual celebrations, of study abroad experiences, and dinners and dancing at conferences—but also stories of difficult decisions, moments of challenge, of questioning, both personal and professional. Graduate training is a long road, requiring high motivation, perseverance, and hard work. There are many bumps along the way: grants and fellowships not received, papers rejected, job offers not forthcoming.
But there are great rewards as well. Scientific discovery is exciting, exhilarating! Working for years on a project, reading the existing research, developing theories and questions, devising new methods, testing your ideas, and obtaining results. And when the results are unexpected, it can be even more interesting—how to understand and interpret when the findings challenge your initial ideas.
This is the never-ending story of science, of discovery and invention, of revisiting and revising your ideas, a slow process with moments of clarity and insight.
I am so proud of each and every one of my students as they have made their way in the world. Each of them has forged their own path. Some have become successful and dedicated researchers, some have become devoted teachers, and some have chosen to contribute via the private sector. All have gained knowledge and skills from their graduate journey to make their own contributions to the never-ending story of science.
Just as scientific progress requires time and resources, so does training scientists. The many years that mentors and students spend together allow the slow, arduous process of scientific understanding to continue uninterrupted. My students are now training the next generation of scientists.
I am privileged to have been a mentor to these young scientists who are now our future. We must continue to invest in training. It is expensive, to be sure; it takes time and resources. In the U.S., most graduate students and post-doctoral fellows are at least partly supported through federal dollars. We depend on these investments to ensure the continuity of science, that the never-ending story is truly never-ending.
Currently, we are facing threats to science, a dismantling of the infrastructure that helps fund this process. Let’s support the never-ending story of science. Let’s support the next generation of scientists so they can meet the challenges of the future. Let’s all stand up for science!