Abstract

IntroductionMany recent mentoring initiatives have sought to help improve the proportion of underrepresented racial and ethnic minorities (URMs) in academic positions across the biomedical sciences. However, the intractable nature of the problem of underrepresentation suggests that many young scientists may require supplemental career development beyond what many mentors are able to offer. As an adjunct to traditional scientific mentoring, we created a novel academic career “coaching” intervention for PhD students in the biomedical sciences.ObjectiveTo determine whether and how academic career coaches can provide effective career-development-related learning experiences for URM PhD students in the biomedical sciences. We focus specifically on vicarious learning experiences, where individuals learn indirectly through the experiences of others.MethodThe intervention is being tested as part of a longitudinal randomized control trial (RCT). Here, we describe a nested qualitative study, using a framework approach to analyze data from a total of 48 semi-structured interviews from 24 URM PhD students (2 interviews per participant, 1 at baseline, 1 at 12-month follow-up) (16 female, 8 male; 11 Black, 12 Hispanic, 1 Native-American). We explored the role of the coach as a source of vicarious learning, in relation to the students’ goal of being future biomedical science faculty.ResultsCoaches were resources through which most students in the study were able to learn vicariously about how to pursue, and succeed within, an academic career. Coaches were particularly useful in instances where students’ research mentors are unable to provide such vicarious learning opportunities, for example because the mentor is too busy to have career-related discussions with a student, or because they have, or value, a different type of academic career to the type the student hopes to achieve.ImplicationsCoaching can be an important way to address the lack of structured career development that students receive in their home training environment.

Highlights

  • Many recent mentoring initiatives have sought to help improve the proportion of underrepresented racial and ethnic minorities (URMs) in academic positions across the biomedical sciences

  • In this paper we focus on URM students in the Academy group, and discuss the role of the coach as a source of vicarious learning

  • We explore the vicarious learning experiences of URM PhD students in the Academy related to their goal of being future faculty

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Summary

Introduction

Many recent mentoring initiatives have sought to help improve the proportion of underrepresented racial and ethnic minorities (URMs) in academic positions across the biomedical sciences. The intractable nature of the problem of underrepresentation suggests that many young scientists may require supplemental career development beyond what many mentors are able to offer. As an adjunct to traditional scientific mentoring, we created a novel academic career “coaching” intervention for PhD students in the biomedical sciences. Data Availability Statement: Ethical restrictions related to participant confidentiality prohibit the authors from making the data set publicly available. Participants were explicitly guaranteed that the data would only be seen my members of the study team. For any discussions about the data set please contact the study’s principal investigator, Richard McGee (rmcgee@northwestern.edu).

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