Q&A: Mentorship in medicine a lifelong trajectory
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Key takeaways:
- Mentors should support the mental well-being of their mentees, Wanda Phipatanakul, MD, MS, said.
- Mentorship requires open communication to thrive, especially concerning conflict, she advised.
Mentoring and being mentored are key to having a successful career in medicine, Wanda Phipatanakul, MD, MS, told Healio.
Phipatanakul, who serves as the S. Jean Emans, MD, endowed professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and director of the division of immunology research center at Boston Children’s Research Hospital, discusses her experiences as a mentor and a mentee in an editorial titled, “On mentoring and being mentored—a lifetime journey and legacy” published in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. From growing up with mentors in her mother and father, both of whom practiced medicine, to advising her first research mentee, Phipatanakul has had a long-term experience with mentorship, which she describes in her editorial as “transcending generations and perpetuating the legacy of mentors.”
Healio spoke with Phipatanakul to expand upon her editorial, discussing her thoughts on how mentor and mentee roles change over time, how to overcome mentor-mentee conflicts, and what a mentor and mentee should have in common for their relationship to thrive.
“I still need mentors and collaborators. I always run ideas by people,” Phipatanakul told Healio. “Mentoring is lifelong; it doesn't go away. You can’t make this journey alone.”
Healio: What has been the most rewarding aspect of being a mentor?
Phipatanakul: Mentoring has been the most rewarding aspect of my entire career. I’ve really enjoyed working with the next generation and helping to ensure that they succeed. Similarly to what I wrote in my piece, when they succeed, I believe that everybody succeeds.
I love helping my mentees develop their own careers and trajectories, as well as inspiring them and I am honored to serve as a role model, which I feel keeps me young and fresh with new ideas. Mentoring also has helped the work we do in the lab, because everybody brings something to the table. Everybody has unique skills and goals, and we all work as a team and individually contribute to the work. It’s been an amazing and fun journey.
Healio: In your editorial you emphasized the importance of advocating for balance and wellness as a mentor. How do you address the escalating problem of physician burnout with your mentees? Do you have any advice for mentors and mentees facing burnout?
Phipatanakul: Maintaining a work-life balance is so important. If I see that a mentee is just focusing on work and nothing else — that is not sustainable. For me, key milestones in my personal life also helped accelerate the successes in my work life.
I try to encourage balance. People should be taking time to take care of their health and making sure their friendships and their relationships are in check. I find that if you don’t advocate for that then you have burnout and the work falters as well.
I like exercising and running; it’s a quick activity that helps me clear my mind. Doing activities unrelated to work — spending time outside, exercising, reading books, watching movies and hanging out with friends and family — is very important.
I try to be a kind of “full-service” mentor where mentees can come and talk to me about anything, because my mentees have complex personal and professional needs.
Also, I always stress balance on both ends. You can't play all day and not put in the work.
Healio: In your editorial, you also described the influence that growing up surrounded by doctors had on your eventual career path. How do familial mentors differ from other mentors?
Phipatanakul: I saw how rewarding practicing medicine was through my family and my parents. They immigrated from Thailand and set up shop in the United States to build a better place for their children — my brother and myself. Even though they had more challenges coming from a different country, they were inspiring role models, and they loved what they did.
Early on I saw the benefits of the career that I ended up choosing, as my mother also was an allergist. She strove for balance. She was an amazing mother and she spent so much time raising us, but she also loved her job and what she was trying to do. She wanted to make a difference. My whole family suffered from allergies, so our chosen profession was kind of like trying to find a cure for ourselves.
Family dynamic is important. My daughter is also going into medicine. I think she sees how much I love my job, and I’ve always told her, “If you find something you really love doing, it’s as if you’ve never really worked a day in your life.”
With family, you can’t hide. But, when working with an outside mentor, you only see them in a certain light at times, unless you meet up outside of work, which I encourage. With family mentors, you see it all, especially if you live with them.
There are many people in the allergy community who are second-generation, third-generation and maybe even fourth-generation allergists. It’s such a rewarding field that we’ve gone into, but we also have the role models of our parents or grandparents and seeing how much they loved it inspired us.
Healio: What are the steps to finding and forming a relationship with a mentor for mentees looking for guidance?
Phipatanakul: When I was a fellow, I met my first mentor, Robert A. Wood, MD. All I knew at that time was that I wanted to do clinical allergy research. We immediately clicked, and we have a great mentor-mentee relationship that persists to this day. When I have something to discuss or when I need advice, I still give him a call and he always makes time for me.
The first step to forming that relationship is seeing if you have admiration and respect for each other and communicate well.
Mentoring is a lifetime journey. Your mentor doesn’t have to be going exactly where you want to go, but they must have the expertise to guide you there. When I finished my fellowship, I moved to Boston and had amazing mentors and collaborators in the Harvard system; these relationships are life lasting.
Healio: You also mentioned the importance of multidisciplinary teams in moving a field forward. What should a mentor and mentee have in common for the relationship to be successful?
Phipatanakul: You need someone who’s doing work that is similar to yours in some aspects. You don’t necessarily have to be interested in the same topic, but they need to have some skills that you want to obtain.
For instance, I have a fellow joining my lab who’s really interested in artificial intelligence. I wouldn’t call myself an AI expert, but I have a lot of experience in doing clinical research and have amassed huge, well-characterized cohorts. Part of his training will be to learn what it takes to build cohorts and then use analytical skills to determine AI as predictors of health outcomes or response.
Often you have co-mentors as well. For example, we will have someone else on the team who’s good at AI machine learning and statistical techniques. We have teams of people who all contribute in different ways.
Multidisciplinary teams help guide a mentee to where they want to go. Your primary mentor is like your parental figure. But you also have these tentacles of different types of experts. Team science is truly powerful.
However, I encourage mentees not to feel like they’re running around to different mentors all the time. They’ll get different perspectives, but also different advice, which can be confusing.
Healio: How important or not have you found it to be for a mentor and mentee to be of the same gender, ethnicity, race, socioeconomic background, etc?
Phipatanakul: I have mentees of all walks of life and of different genders, races, ethnicities and backgrounds. It does help to relate to the mentor, and gender can play into this. My mom’s mentor, my mentor, and my mentee are all white men, which is OK. But it was also very important for me to have a mentor like Diane Gold, MD, MPH, a woman with three children and a family. I think there are differences between the expectations of men vs. women in academics, especially as it pertains to having families, so for me it was important to see another woman in my field who had achieved work-life balance.
Although the disparity between men and women in leadership roles is known and something we are trying to overcome, the number of women who get promoted all the way to full professor at Harvard or become division or department heads or leaders remains markedly disparate vs. men.
My work tends to attract a lot of minority groups. My ethnicity is not considered minority in the world of medicine, but because our work is so focused on disparities, many of my mentees are from historically underrepresented groups, including Black and Hispanic people.
It’s good if you can find a mentor who you can relate to, but sometimes it’s not possible. I’m not a Black woman, so my Black mentees don’t have the same race as me, but they do see the work that I have done is really dedicated to reducing racial and ethnic disparities and health disparities in general. It’s important for both mentor and mentee to feel the connection.
Healio: How should mentor and mentee navigate conflict and disagreements in their relationship?
Phipatanakul: Conflict does happen. For example, there are sometimes mentor-mentee disputes over authorship.
I think having a meeting and discussing and understanding opposing viewpoints in a thoughtful, respectful manner can solve these disputes.
Sometimes you may need an outside body, such as your division head or your chief, to objectively look at a situation and make a ruling. I’ve had experiences where that was required. But people should know that it’s OK to seek outside help when you cannot resolve the conflict between the two of you.
Healio: In your editorial, you wrote that, “Mentoring/mentee relationships are lifelong.” How has your role as a mentor and a mentee changed as you developed professionally and personally? Do you still seek mentorship?
Phipatanakul: I still need mentors and collaborators. I always run ideas by people. I’m never going to reach the point where I made it and I know everything there is to know and I don’t need a mentor.
But, I would say your need for mentorship evolves. My early-career academic mentees ask me for all kinds of advice as they progress through their career. They ask questions about receiving their first grant; running their own independent lab; and dealing with finances, budgets and HR issues.
As time has evolved, I’m much better at some of the things I do because I’ve been doing them for 24 years. So, I’m able to give good advice and expertise to people because I’ve been living and breathing it for so long. These experiences are something you can’t read about in textbooks — these are lifelong experiences.
As you get older and more experienced, you change and you develop professionally and personally. You’re better at certain activities and you become more efficient. You learn from the wisdom of your mentors and collaborators.
I still do seek mentorship and I always will. I am mentored and I mentor others, and that is a lifelong trajectory.
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For more information:
Wanda Phipatanakul, MD, MS, can be reached at wanda.phipatanakul@childrens.harvard.edu; X (Twitter): @wphipmd; LinkedIn: Wanda Phipatanakul, MD, MS.