1. What were your motives for helping this person?
-The context: helping a chemistry graduate student get started on writing her Original Proposal (OP), the requirement to become a Ph.D. candidate.
- She reached out and it felt she was eager to get started. She seemed determined to make progress with her OP. I didn’t have any ulterior motives except for helping another student who, like me, has been labeled an underrepresented minority (URM) in Chemistry/STEM.
2. Did you benefit from this relationship in any way? How?
- Not directly or in an obvious way. The experience helped me think more about mentoring and advising skills: I started prioritizing her needs, gauging what she was willing to do and work on based on her other time commitments, and using different strategies to assess what she already knew and how to work from there.
3. What was your role in the helping relationship? In what way do you think you helped this person? Looking back, is there anything that you might have done differently?
- I thought of my role as being an “accountability buddy” for this person. She expressed that our weekly meetings pushed her to get something done because she wanted to respect and appreciate my time. I helped her come up with a structure and strategy to write her OP. Looking back, I would have tried to assess more if our relationship was meeting her needs and expectations.
4. Was there anything that this person did, said, or believed that you did not agree with? How did you react?
- Nothing major. She would cancel meetings last minute but it’s something out of my control. I told her it was okay to cancel meetings to take care of herself and I made myself available to her whenever she felt like she could tackle the OP again.
5. Did you learn anything from this relationship?
- I learned that it’s okay to help others even if it seems or feels the “receiver” is getting more than the “giver”. I learned about the importance of discussing needs and expectations early in the relationship.