Beronda Montgomery: Growing from adviser to mentor

MSUToday - Featured stories March 8, 2017
Beronda Montgomery is MSU Foundation Professor of biochemistry and molecular biology and microbiology and molecular genetics in the Department of Energy Plant Research Laboratory. She serves as assistant provost of faculty and academic staff development—research and scholarship.
I remember the great responsibility I felt when the first graduate student decided to join my research team. In preparing for her arrival, I highlighted the list of course requirements for her doctoral program and quickly outlined the first biochemistry experiments that she would conduct. I was cautiously optimistic that we would be positioned to make significant inroads in understanding how plants perceive what is going on around them to inform which activities and behaviors best situate them for success and productivity based on the environments in which they exist, which is one focus of my scientific work.
As the student began to work diligently in the laboratory, it quickly became clear that my preparation had positioned me to serve as an adviser, but not necessarily a mentor. These are two names that are often used interchangeably to describe what happens when engaging with those individuals we supervise. However, I have come to fully understand that advising does not equal mentoring. Advising at its core is offering advice or factual information that would benefit any individual on a defined course of action – and I was clearly prepared to do that valiantly. I knew exactly what classes a student seeking a doctoral degree in my student’s chosen discipline needed to take.
Mentoring is so much more than offering generic advice. As I began to know the student, I realized that her needs were centered in her prior experiences and individual characteristics. The challenge that I faced was that in all of the preparation I had received for leading successful research, I had not received intentional preparation for developing a personal philosophy ...


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