And mentor-time is hard to come by. There aren’t many people who are able to i) impart the skills of research idea generation and evaluation and ii) donate enough time to actually help you learn good taste. That’s not to say it isn’t possible to find someone happy to mentor you, but getting comments on your Google Docs every 3 months is unlikely to be good enough. I think an hour every other week is the minimum mentorship most people need, although some people are exceptionally quick independent learners.
This seems pretty false to me. In worlds where this is true, orgs like MATS, ASTRA, and AISC wouldn’t be as popular as they are, with both mentors and entrants to the field. And every 6 months it seems like MATS at least adds a bunch more high-quality mentors to their list. Mentor time is valuable, but 30 minutes a week seems a price very many are chomping at the bit to give to help train up future researchers.
MATS mentorships are often weekly, but only for limited time, unlike PhD programs that offer mentorship for several years. These years are probably often necessary to develop good research taste.
I didn’t claim that MATS was a replacement, just that there’s lots of latent demand. I wouldn’t be surprised if a good fraction of the mentors in MATS would be happy to continue to mentor their mentees far after MATS, modulo the mentor and mentee getting along. Would be interesting if MATS had numbers on how often this happens naturally, though I don’t think they do (I probably would have heard about such a survey).
This seems pretty false to me. In worlds where this is true, orgs like MATS, ASTRA, and AISC wouldn’t be as popular as they are, with both mentors and entrants to the field. And every 6 months it seems like MATS at least adds a bunch more high-quality mentors to their list. Mentor time is valuable, but 30 minutes a week seems a price very many are chomping at the bit to give to help train up future researchers.
MATS mentorships are often weekly, but only for limited time, unlike PhD programs that offer mentorship for several years. These years are probably often necessary to develop good research taste.
I didn’t claim that MATS was a replacement, just that there’s lots of latent demand. I wouldn’t be surprised if a good fraction of the mentors in MATS would be happy to continue to mentor their mentees far after MATS, modulo the mentor and mentee getting along. Would be interesting if MATS had numbers on how often this happens naturally, though I don’t think they do (I probably would have heard about such a survey).