Mentorship Values

Dr. Meisel’s Mentorship Values and Approach to Mentorship

As a mentor, I hope to have a lasting and meaningful impact on my mentees that help them reach their career goals as clinical scientists. My values and approach to mentoring are largely shaped by my high school, college, graduate school, and my postdoctoral fellowship mentors who played an instrumental role in shaping my life as well as the trajectory of my career. My mentorship is rooted in the following values:

Fostering Passion: I believe identifying and fostering my mentees’ passion in clinical psychology is essential for setting them on a path towards a meaningful and impactful career. Accordingly, I strive to help my mentees identify their passion(s) in clinical science whether that be related to theory, methodology, data analytics, treatment development, or another component of the SUMMIT lab’s research.
Training: Conducting research on adolescent substance use is complex as it requires training in developmental theory, developmental methods, addiction science, addiction research methodology, treatment research including studying mechanisms of behavior change, diversity science, and advanced longitudinal quantitative methods. I am committed to providing hands on training experiences in these areas to all of my mentees.
Critical Thinking: Of all the training I provide my mentees, I place the greatest emphasis on critical thinking skills. These skills are intended to help you evaluate research quality and impact, link different literatures across psychology and other scientific disciplines to inform your work, form novel and clinically meaningful research questions, and reflect on your own assumptions, beliefs, and values.
Investment and Availability: I am invested in the success of all my mentees and I demonstrate this by making myself readily available to my mentees. I meet with my mentees regularly each week with meetings ranging from 30 minutes to 1 hour depending on my mentees training stage and needs. I strive to return drafts of manuscripts, grants, and conference presentations within a week. If for any reason (e.g., family matters, grant deadline, conference travel) I cannot meet with my mentees or meet my turnaround deadline, I let them know ahead of time to the best of my availability.
Mutual Respect: I believe that a mentor and mentee should respect one another professionally and personally. I will strive to earn the respect of my mentees through acting in line with my mentorship values, modeling integrity and rigor in my research and clinical practice, and being authentic (e.g., I will acknowledge my mistakes and limitations).
Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging: I am a White, cisgender, male who has not personally experienced difficulties with substance use. I recognize that my framing and approach to studying adolescent substance use is likely influenced by my background. I believe having mentees in the SUMMIT who come from different backgrounds with respect to race, culture, ethnicity, gender and sexual identity, religion, socioeconomic status, and lived experience with substance use or other mental health conditions is imperative to conducting more meaningful, rigorous, and impactful science. Moreover, it is impossible to study substance use without acknowledging the racist practices involved in the laws and implementation of laws surrounding substances. I strive to help my mentees recognize and combat racist practices related to the use and treatment of individuals who use substances.
Willingness to Have Difficult Conversations: Relationships with mentees are often life-long, and such committed relationships require the ability to work through difficult conversations in addition to enjoying good times. Considering graduate school and postdoctoral training consistently involves evaluations of mentee’s progress and dealing with rejection (e.g., papers, grants, conference submissions), many conversations with mentees center around identifying and fostering growth areas. Additionally, I too make mistakes, misspeak, and forget things. Regardless of whether the difficult conversation centers around myself or my mentee, I encourage these conversations, approach them with compassion, and view them as growth opportunities believe they make the mentor-mentee relationship stronger.

In line with the SUMMIT’s developmental psychopathology approach to studying adolescent substance use, my mentorship is rooted in core developmental principles: (1) Equifinality – I believe there are numerous pathways that lead applicants to being strong candidates for the SUMMIT lab and that there are multiple pathways that lead mentees to successful careers in clinical psychology. (2) Multifinality – I recognize that mentees who start in the SUMMIT lab may develop different interests within adolescent substance use and end up wanting training experiences and careers that look quite different from each other. To tailor my mentoring to the unique starting points and career trajectories of my mentees, I take a developmental approach to mentoring where I seek to provide my mentees with feedback and support that is appropriate for their training stage. In line with this approach, I use Individual Development Plans (IDPs). IDPs contain mentees’ unique goals for each academic year, opportunities for self-assessment of skills and documenting progress towards their goals. The use of IDPs ensures that myself and my mentee have a mutual understanding of their goals and a tool to track their progress towards their goals. I will have set meetings with my mentees at least every six months to review their IDPs and ensure that we are hitting agreed upon benchmarks to meet their goals.