Will You Be My Mentor?—Four Archetypes to Help Mentees Succeed in Academic Medicine

Abstract

The origins of mentoring date back to Odysseus, who entrusted care of his son to Mentor when he set off to fight the Trojan wars. Mentor became a trusted advisor, teacher, and friend to Telemachus, epitomizing the attributes that we look for even today when discussing a mentor. Many textbooks and articles in multiple disciplines have been written about the art of mentorship.1 For example, in medical education, advising programs and professional development during clerkships provide mentoring.2 In a collaboration of mentee and mentor, Straus and Sackett,3 a pioneer in evidence-based medicine, highlighted the following evidence-based reasons why academic clinicians benefit from mentoring: they publish more papers, get more grants, are promoted faster, and are more likely to stay at their academic institutions with greater career satisfaction and self-reliance. More recently, an effort to distill what the best mentors do has also emerged as a question of particular interest in the fast-paced world of management.