At the beginning of this year an email was sent around our university mailing list advertising the services of ‘Mentornet’ an e-mentoring website. As the only non-Chinese speaking and female postdoc in my immediate working environment I thought that this may potentially be an opportunity for me to open lines of communication with a more experienced female academic who may offer advice and support in an environment lacking in day-to-day interactions with people that I am able to directly relate to. Six months after posting my plea on the site I now have a mentor, a male professor at the University of Hyderabad, so not exactly the demographic that I was aiming for. However, as with most decisions there was more than one reason for my seeking a ‘virtual’ mentor, not least that I am extremely curious about most things and have always had an interest in education. In taking a virtual mentor I hope to learn more about what makes a ‘good’ mentor; if an individual can provide support, relevant feedback and help trigger meaningful thoughts and ideas from across the ether then what are the techniques used to do this? How can these techniques be used in a traditional mentor/protegee or supervisor/student relationship? I hope one day to have students of my own (somehow that sentence has changed since I was younger!) and realise that the workload of an academic supervisor is heavy; therefore probably the only way to deal with a high number of responsibilities (if delegating is not an option) is to increase effeciency and effectiveness.

The e-mentoring relationship is going pretty well so far, the only problem that we’ve encountered is that I’m not able to keep up with the frequency of his emails! I’m currently taking a week of vacation back in England and therefore, as usual, the week before my departure was even more hectic than normal; this was compounded by the fact that we now have a new research assistant in the lab for the summer (woo-hoo! – more on this later) who needed training so that she could work independently whilst I’m away. E-mentor is a computational biologist/biophysist and therefore his work is somewhat removed from my own, I’m pleased about this and am looking forward to discussing science that differs from the work that I discuss with my boss on a regular basis. In addition, e-mentor has already made a number of interesting points that I’d like to discuss with him further – now I just need to find the time when I’m back in the lab! Of course there are cultural differences as well and I hope that my e-mentoring relationship will help me learn more about them. One interesting thing that was mentioned was the concept of the postdoctoral period almost as a time of ‘earning your stripes’ and performing work at the command of your boss without opportunity to develop your own ideas, so that the postdoctoral period is something to ‘escape’ from. Although there are subscribers to this philosophy I personally disagree with it (and hope to still do so when I have my own lab!); of course, your work must fit in with the interests of the lab in which you work but if your boss is merely looking for hands to execute his own experiments then he should be hiring a research assistant and not a postdoc. Based on the comments of e-mentor and my own experience I think that maybe we have a more ‘progressive’ approach to postdoctoral freedom in the UK and US than in India. Any comments on this?