) Second, determine what percentage of trainees in the lab are postdocs versus graduate and undergraduate students. A lab that is nearly all postdoctoral fellows may suggest that the lab head does not enjoy, or wishes to minimize, time spent mentoring. Good mentoring takes much time and devotion. Therefore, graduate students should be very cautious about selecting unusually large labs. Your lab rotation will give you an additional chance to assess all these questions. Lastly, and most importantly, it is critical that you determine the faculty member’s track record of mentoring success. One way to begin to address this question is to obtain a copy of his or her “trainees list” (this will of

this website course not be helpful in vetting junior faculty who do not yet have a long track record of training).

This trainees list, which is required to be submitted for each faculty participating in an NIH training grant, is a simple list of all of the graduate students and postdoctoral fellows a faculty member has ever had and what job they are doing today. Asking potential advisors for their trainees list might be a tad awkward, so graduate program offices should keep EPZ-6438 cell line up-to-date copies of these lists on file for their students, and I believe that the information contained in these trainees lists is so important that the NIH should post this information electronically in a publically accessible database. It is not uncommon when looking at trainees lists for all of the faculty in the same department or program to find widely varying “success” rates, with some mentors having 70% of their students attain academic positions and others sometimes only 10% or even fewer. Not every student ends up having their own lab, whether because of choice or ability, and so even the very best advisors rarely have more than 50% of their graduates going on to have their own labs. But if only a very small percentage of trainees go on to have

their own labs (whether in academia, industry, or government), this is a warning sign that little successful mentoring is happening. Some scientists are simply better mentors than others (just as some models of cars and espresso machines are better than others). Some don’t enjoy mentoring, some don’t want to be bothered, and some plain don’t know how. The output of a truly great lab is not measured only in below Nobel prizes and research articles but just as importantly in how many successful scientists it trains. I certainly do not mean to discount in any way the value and importance of training young scientists to go into other excellent science careers including teaching, science writing, scientific journals, consulting, etc. In any case, quality mentoring will of course greatly enable your performance in all of these alternative careers as well. I have previously written about the challenges that talented women still all too often face in their careers (Barres, 2006).