Dear Bob: A Letter to My Mentor

You are the reason I moved from San Francisco to Pittsburgh. There was a lot I didn't understand about academia back then, when I was interviewing across the country for my first job. But one thing I did figure out was that there was no way I was going to succeed as a clinician-investigator without great mentorship, and everyone agreed that you were an outstanding mentor.

You were already a full professor with many clinical, administrative, and leadership roles when we started working together. You shouldn't have had time for me, but you did. This became immediately clear. You emailed daily. I knew I could call or text you with questions. At one point, the “favorites” list in my phone included my husband, my parents, my sisters, and you.

We became neighbors. For many years, before I had my own car, I took the bus to work and purposefully waited on the corner across the street from your house at 7 am, when I knew you left for work. On good days you would notice and offer me a ride. Those rides gave me a chance to pick your brain for 20 minutes early in the morning, before you were tired or annoyed by the endless papercuts of a long day in academic medicine. I learned a lot from you on those drives.

Some things you taught me: Showing up matters. Your absence will be noticed more than your presence. Write short active sentences. Avoid adverbs. Worrying is failing in advance. When you don't get an answer, follow-up and then follow-up again. Papers tell a story, and you only get to tell one. Read outside of medicine. Remember birthdays. Slow down.

You often drove me crazy. Like when I would spend days crafting and recrafting a set of specific aims to send to you, only to have you return them within half an hour, the margins filled with comments that were rife with typos, but once deciphered pointed out critical holes in my argument or new strategies I needed to consider.

It never mattered whether you were the senior author or a middle author or not even an author. You still responded with the same amount of input and the same speed. This helped me to recognize that it wasn't about you, it was about me.

I think that's what differentiates great mentorship from good mentorship. Good mentors offer the opportunity to follow in their footsteps, expecting that your accomplishments will shine a light on theirs. Great mentors offer the chance to get where you want to go. With great mentors, failures are expected. Mistakes are explored. There is permission to take a different path.

When I won a research award from our national organization I thanked you by name, and looking out at a huge crowd of palliative care clinicians and scientists, I realized that everyone knew who you were. You had mentored most of them too.

So it wasn't that I was special so much as that you made me feel special. You made me feel like I was worth the investment. Like I could do the hard things I wanted to do, like the NIH would be missing out on a huge opportunity if they failed to fund my work, like the reviewer who panned my article was having a particularly bad day and perhaps needed therapy to help with their insecurities and false beliefs.

You weren't a big one for celebrations, but when I got my first R01, you dropped off a card. It said “Congratu-f-ing-lations. I knew you could do it.”

I have never once hugged you, because I know you don't like hugs. I have thanked you, but undoubtably not often enough. I can't repay you, because mentorship is not transactional. Instead I try to pass on what you taught me, continuing a tradition I see as the glue holding together the pieces of every career in academic medicine. And I celebrate this tradition, because I recognize that without it so many of us would be lonely and lost, unable to figure out our next moves.

With gratitude,

Yael