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Mentor and Mentee Expectations

​The primary goal of these guidelines is to create a supportive community that benefits everyone in the lab. My goal is to cultivate a safe environment built on trust, communication, and mutual respect​​. Most importantly, the Gliniak laboratory’s goal is to encourage and uplift trainees. The lab will work to promote diversity and inclusivity across experiences, races, abilities, genders, ethnicities, and cultural differences. Gliniak laboratory members will work hard and support one another in the ups and downs of scientific research and life.

Everyone in our group will always:
  1. Be enthusiastic to learn about what you don’t know.
  2. Be genuine in what you know and don’t know.
  3. Treat everyone respectfully
  4. Actively include everyone
  5. Communicate openly
  6. Honestly represent experiments
  7. Email people back
  8. Maintain all required training
  9. Ask if you are unsure about anything
As the Principal Investigator, I will:
  1. Create funding to support your paycheck, your experiments, and our university infrastructure.
  2. Help you achieve your career objectives
  3. Communicate with you when expectations are being met, and not being met
  4. Facilitate publishing your work by:
  5. Providing ideas for experiments.
  6. Showing you how to do some experiments.
  7. Meeting with you formally once a week.
  8. I will maintain confidentiality during any and all discussions​
​As an Undergrad Researcher, I expect you to:​
  1. Show up. This is actually the main thing.
  2. Maintain your required training and know what they are.
  3. Be respectful of the professional scientists in the lab doing high-level research.
  4. Always ask if you are unsure of anything.
  5. If something is low or empty let someone know.
  6. Be a “doer” – have a desire to work and get your hands dirty!
  7. Be willing to do rote lab tasks to gain real-life lab experience.
  8. Commit to spending a full summer working full-time in lab.
  9. Communicate a self-assessment of meeting your own expectations with me.
As a PhD student, I expect you to:
  1. Take ownership of your training (its your responsibility to bring your problems to me).
  2. Take the initiative to meet with me weekly, and try to say hi everyday.
  3. Read papers on your own, don’t wait for me to ask you.
  4. Submit a F31
  5. Learn how to plan, design, and execute high-quality scientific research.
  6. Listen when your committee and mentors try to help you.
  7. Learn how to document your experiments properly.
  8. Learn how to communicate your experiments in writing and orally.
  9. Communicate your own expectations with me.
As a Postdoc Fellow, I expect you to:
  1. Train and support other trainees
  2. Aim for high-impact papers. This is your time to shine.
  3. Have urgency to publish.
  4. Create your own funding F32, AHA, ADA etc
  5. Refine and expand your technical, writing and oral presentation skills.
  6. Quickly define a career goal
  7. Communicate a self-assessment of meeting your own expectations with me.
  8. Develop the skills required for that career, I will help you!

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*Above based on Copyright Ray Blind, Vanderbilt, TN https://www.blindlab.org/expectations