Life in Science Let’s get rid of confidential ‘reference letters’ in academia — a tool misused by abusive supervisors Reference letters hold a lot of power over an academic's career path and can make an ECR's life miserable if they are stuck in an abusive lab. Here, eLife community ambassadors Ruchika, Rio, and Suhaila advocate for alternative ways to get to know an applicant. Multiple authors 14 Sep 2023 • 6 min read
Careers My Successful Mentoring Experiment Throughout our scientific training process, many of us find ourselves asking if we have what it takes to become a successful mentor. In this blog post, Ruchika Bajaj shares her experience with designing a mentoring experiment to test the hypothesis that she can, and will be a great mentor. Ruchika Bajaj 3 Aug 2023 • 6 min read
Life in Science From Lone Wolf to Pack Power: Empowering Early-Career Researchers through Scientific Communities Life as a scientist comes with many personal and professional challenges. Thankfully, we do not need to face them alone, as there are many others like us out there. In this post, Yu-Fang Yang shares how she found the best communities for her and how being together lifts everyone up. Yu-Fang Yang 14 Jul 2023 • 6 min read
Life in Science Here's how COVID-19 is affecting my first year in graduate school The rapidly and constantly evolving COVID-19 situation has dramatically affected career plans for both early-career faculty [https://www.chronicle.com/article/Covid-19-Crisis-Widens-Divide/248276] and senior graduate students [https://emergency.rice. Zach Zeisler 27 Apr 2020 • 5 min read
Mentoring "My PhD broke me"—bullying in academia and a call to action Workplace bullying [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877042813017965]—repetitive abusive, threatening, humiliating and intimidating behaviour—is on the rise globally. And matters are worse in academia. In the ecrLife 5 Nov 2019 • 8 min read
Mentoring Creating mutualism between research and teaching Teaching in academia is often seen as a distraction from research. Teaching takes time, energy, resources and, most importantly, does not produce any papers. In many universities, if you are Guillaume Lobet 27 Jun 2019 • 6 min read
Mentoring Assessing the quality of mentorship in research environments > A mentor is someone who allows you to see the hope inside yourself. Oprah Winfrey > Show me a successful individual and I’ll show you someone who had ecrLife 5 Mar 2019 • 3 min read