Early Career Mentoring Posted on January 20, 2009 Victoria D. Ojeda (bio) describes specific techniques applicable to early career mentoring.

I would say within the last year, I have slowly adopted the role of mentor and faculty person. I started off as research faculty, but within the last few months, I would say within the last year, really have grown in terms of working with junior folks.

So I now, I've had several bachelor-level students work with me on research projects, several master's level students, and even doctoral students, so I think one of my objectives in working with junior folks, whether it's bachelor's or doctoral level students, is really to expose them to the whole research process, starting from what it is to write a grant. How do you look for a grant? What does it mean to actually write it? What are the components of a grant? What do you need to do in order to get your IRB to approve your research study? How do you protect your participants and their confidentiality? Those sort of issues, all the way through the data analysis part.

My students often get to write little pieces of the project, and then I provide feedback on their writing. They also have the opportunity to help present some of the data when there are opportunities to do so.

And so I feel like I'm very active, very involved, in kind of giving guidance and explaining the why you do the things that you do. It's not just, "Here, do this piece of a project", but really sort of explaining what the whole objective is to each activity that we do because I think that that's really fundamental to understanding the whole research process. And so I think that's been a lot of fun.