To most academic fledglings (i.e. graduate students and postdocs) finding a good mentor is both a difficult and one of the most important early career task, or as Adrian Lee, Carina Dennis & Philip Campbell put is in their Nature’s guide for mentors feature:
Having a good mentor early in your career can mean the difference between success and failure in any field.
Unfortunately good mentor skills remain one of the least appreciated academic skills among faculty. The Nature awards for creative mentoring in science was created in an attempt to try to remedy this situation. While this award highlights the importance of good mentoring skills it provides limited incentives for improving the state of mentoring in academia. For starters an award like this should be based on mentor evaluations provided by students and postdocs, not by faculty themselves the way it is now. Furthermore, this award seems premature. If one is serious about changing the state of mentoring in academia one should first and foremost focus on changing the status of mentoring among universities themselves and among granting agencies funding academic research. Universities have to put more emphasize on the importance of good mentoring skills as part of tenure evaluations as well as other faculty promotions and granting agencies should consider mentoring skills when evaluating grant applications. After all most of the actual work that will be done under a grant will be performed by graduate students and postdocs. Once this has been achieved then an award like this (but where mentors are evaluated and nominated by students and postdocs) would be more meaningful.
i think that you’re quite right – an award (a single award, at that) for good mentorship and advising is an important step in the right direction, but the real change needs to be systemic.
academic departments need to cohesively include that (vital) aspect of being a scientist into tenure considerations. the world’s progressing and science admin has stayed surprisingly rigid. and so rewarding good mentorship would be a big improvement.
Its so unfortunate some of the mentors make your life miserable. The position of Post docs should be scraped.
To be honest, there are very few good mentors who really goes out of the way to help their postdocs. Its a shame that most postdocs end up postdocing for a bit of time till they end up in a proper job.