Prospective Graduate Students

My Mentorship Style

This is a question that I get asked alot and - to be honest - its hard to answer. I'm a firm believer that the best way to assess that sort of thing is to ask the people who I have mentored. For those that ultimately get invited to interview for my lab, you'll have just that opportunity. 

For the purposes of this website, though, I think the next best subsitute is to express my values as it pertains to mentorship and try to give some concrete examples of the way I have approached with my past mentees. In my time at Purdue I have had 6 students for whom I've served as the primary mentor. As of 2024, four of those have graduated with their Ph.Ds and are now off in professional roles (for more details see Lab Alumni). 

In choosing a student to mentor I am making a commitment to give the student the tools and support to succeed in our program and beyond. That commitment is to a human being and in that sense I want to connect with each student as a person and understand their unique goals in order to best advise on how to reach them. At the start of each student's grad program we will discuss a broad set of goals for their training and use that to guide future decisions. We will also revisit this plan at the start of each semester to identify concrete goals and objectives for that time frame. 

I believe that mentorship is best accomplished through weekly in-person meetings. I aim to meet with each of my students for an hour, once per week. We also generally have a one-hour per week meeting as a full lab, that includes all graduate and undergraduate students. The lab is kept small intentionally both as our type of research often is not labor intensive and because I value getting to know each person on the team. In most years, a portion of our lab will travel together to scientific conferences. 

In addition to those formal meetings, I try to create opportunities to get to know students more informally as well. My family typically hosts my graduate students at our home for a dinner once or twice per year. At the end of each semester, our lab celebrates with an outing to lunch and/or an activity. In recent semesters this has taken the form of a lunch followed by an escape room or indoor mini-golf. I am firm believer in work life balance and want to make time for fun as well as working hard. Some images from those events are on my Twitter/X account: https://x.com/DBsamuel_phd

With regard to work-life balance, I seek to support my grad students where they are. In some cases this will be pushing students to work harder or keep them on task, but given the intrinsic motiviation that drives them to the field, this more often takes the shape of figuring out how to draw boundaries from work, or find ways to succeed within their life circumstances. Graduate students are often in our program for a large portion of their 20's. This is a time of life that is often filled with lots of exciting personal events, including weddings and children. These will take priority over the graduate student identity, at times, and I've always worked with my students to navigate those dynamics in the context of their career goals. For example, see this feature on one of my former students, Meredith Bucher (https://www.purdue.edu/hhs/news/2021/04/purdue-graduate-students-juggle-parenthood-during-a-pandemic/). 

At the end of the day, my skills and abilities are best able to help students navigate toward reserach careers. This is consistent with my view of myself and our program as embracing a Clinical Science Training Model (https://www.acadpsychclinicalscience.org/). I strive to recruit students who want this training model, but the trajectories within that have taken many different shapes. I do not have pre-determined ideal outcome for any student, but from the outset we work from the understanding that they want to be a scientist and my job is to walk alongside them to help them figure out how to make their work most consistent with their goals. I've had graduate students go on to faculty positions in research departments, as well as smaller Liberal Arts colleges and I've celebrated each of those.