Mentorship Series: Kuang-Tse Wang and Carrie Adler

January 27, 2025

Kuang-Tse Wang and Carrie Adler
Doctoral candidate Kuang-Tse Wang and Professor Carrie Adler

As a graduate student, having a positive relationship with your mentor is the linchpin of your success, but how do you build these crucial ties and get the mentoring you need?

This academic year, we’re interviewing faculty-graduate student pairs about what makes their mentoring relationships work. From practical tips to broader perspectives, these Q&As will equip you with ideas and tactics for improving your own mentoring relationships.

This week, we’re speaking with Kuang-Tse Wang, a Ph.D. candidate in genetics, genomics, and development, and Carrie Adler, associate professor of molecular medicine.


At-a-Glance

For Mentees:

  • Strive to find a balance between self-awareness and insights from your mentor, and know when to ask for help.
  • Prioritize mutual respect and approach the relationship with an open mind and a willingness to learn.
  • Learn how to communicate effectively with your mentor, as it can lead to both professional and personal growth.

For Mentors:

  • Work to find the balance between giving students independence and guidance.
  • Have regular conversations to establish mutual goals, celebrate accomplishments, and give and receive feedback.
  • Address any issues as they arise rather than postponing a resolution until later.

Kuang-Tse Wang, Ph.D. Candidate in Genetics, Genomics, and Development

How did you identify your mentoring needs and how has that self-understanding helped shape your approach to find, foster, and engage in mentoring relationships?

My mentoring needs arise from both self-awareness and insights from my mentor. As I work on projects, it becomes clearer what resources I require to achieve my goals, or at what frequency I want to brainstorm with my mentor. Facing challenges has taught me the importance of being open to asking for help, especially from my mentor. At the same time, my mentor has pointed out areas where I consistently need guidance, particularly in professional development. For example, understanding the optimal timing for publications, building a strong CV, networking at conferences, and navigating career milestones are areas where I’ve benefited from her insights. Reflecting on my needs, identifying which have been addressed and which remain unmet, has helped me understand my needs better. Since these needs evolve over the course of graduate school, maintaining open conversations about them has been essential.

How do you collaboratively identify and establish mutual expectations around communication, conflict resolution, and other key areas to best work and grow together?

We hold a yearly meeting to establish expectations and reflect on the past year collaboratively. Before the meeting, we individually document achievements and set upcoming goals. During the meeting, we review these together to ensure the goals are realistic and discuss strategies for achieving them. This process fosters open communication and mutual respect, creating an environment where we feel heard and supported. Throughout the year, I revisit the year’s plan to stay aligned with the discussed priorities and ensure progress toward our shared goals. This practice keeps us on track and reinforces our commitment to working and growing together.

What is your best advice for students looking to create and maintain a positive relationship with a mentor?

My best advice is to prioritize mutual respect. Your needs and your mentor’s expectations won’t always align perfectly, so finding common ground is essential. Mentors’ insights often stem from their unique experiences and personalities, which may not always seem intuitive at first. However, by approaching the relationship with respect and an open mind, you can maintain positivity and discover constructive ways to navigate any differences.

What does it mean to you personally to be a good mentee and partner in a mentor-mentee relationship?

To me, being a good mentee and partner in a mentor-mentee relationship means approaching the relationship with respect, openness, and a willingness to learn. It is about continually assessing their needs and progress while remaining open to growth. At the same time, I strive to contribute to the relationship by expressing gratitude, being receptive to constructive criticism, and following through on commitments. For me, this partnership is built on trust, collaboration, and a shared commitment to achieving goals while fostering mutual growth.

What do you believe is the key to success in a productive mentor-mentee relationship?

I believe that the key to success in a productive mentor-mentee relationship is being self-aware and communicative. A mentee must first understand their needs and articulate them clearly to their mentor. This openness establishes a strong foundation for collaboration, ensuring that both academic objectives and personal growth are prioritized. A truly productive relationship extends beyond achieving short-term goals—it’s about learning to think differently, act professionally, and approach challenges with fresh perspectives. Effective communication in such a relationship fosters creativity, enhances scientific efficiency, cultivates critical thinking, and ultimately enables growth as both a professional and a person.


Carrie Adler, Associate Professor of Molecular Medicine

What positive or negative experiences inform your approach to mentorship or help shape your philosophy?

Most of my training was in large labs where the graduate students and postdocs were given a tremendous amount of independence to guide their projects. These experiences were valuable for my development as a scientist: learning how to do informative experiments, taking ownership of my mistakes, and deciding which direction I wanted to take my projects. To me, it is this independence that defines a Ph.D. experience and makes it especially worthwhile. It builds the confidence that is necessary for doing research and going into unchartered territory. Confidence, initiative, and ownership are essential skills for any successful career.

However valuable this independence is in hindsight, I definitely remember struggling with it at the beginning of graduate school. You are essentially given unlimited opportunities to pursue interesting research questions, but how do you know if your experiments will take the project in the right direction? This is where the role of the mentor comes in – to steer the ship. During our weekly one-on-one meetings and group meetings, we discuss new data and its next steps, then agree on which directions to pursue. Even though my lab is smaller than the ones I trained in, I try to strike the balance between letting students forge their own paths with the fact that we talk almost every day.

What makes mentoring important to you?

Since starting my lab, I have realized that it is truly a gift to be in my position to act as a mentor. Helping undergraduates, Ph.D. students, or postdoctoral fellows advance to the next step of their careers is incredibly rewarding. I view my role as that of an enabler: How can we work together to equip the mentee with the necessary skills and resume to move on? When they succeed in achieving their goals, whether that is getting into medical or graduate school, or landing that job, it is just as gratifying for me as it is for them. Looking back on my own career development, I also realize the significant role that my own mentors played in shaping my career, even in the tiniest ways. 

How do you collaboratively identify and establish mutual expectations around communication, conflict resolution, and other key areas to best work and grow together?

We follow the recommendations of graduate fields and the Graduate School to perform annual evaluations. In addition, we kick off the year with conversations about long-term goals. In January, we dedicate our first one-on-one meeting to discuss what was accomplished in the previous calendar year and what our goals are for the upcoming year, including professional goals. We do this according to Angela DePace’s recommendations that were published in Molecular Cell in 2015. What’s unique about it is that both the student and the mentor complete each section. It’s interesting to see where we agree and where we diverge – sometimes I forget about important accomplishments! There’s also a section on feedback, both for the mentee to tell me what’s working and what isn’t, and for me to do the same. During this conversation, we create a roadmap for the upcoming year, planning papers and conferences month by month. This exercise is critical because it allows us to focus on ‘big-picture’ goals that are important metrics for the Ph.D. and beyond. We often refer back to this plan in the summer to see if we’re on track.

I also complete a roadmap for myself for the upcoming year. Often, my primary goals, like grant submissions, depend on data or papers from students. It is essential that we communicate about my expectations, because it sometimes takes months of planning to acquire that key piece of data. We are working as a team and it’s critical that they know how they can contribute to our successes!

What is your process to review and refine your mentoring agreement to ensure it is timely and contextually relevant based upon the mentee’s academic and professional standing and progress? For example, needs for a pre A-exam student will be different from those of a doctoral candidate on the job market.

This is precisely the goal of our annual check-ins in January. I realize now that a lot of the anxiety that students experience in graduate school is universal: settling on a project in the first few months after joining the lab, TAing for the first time, learning how to write papers, and passing the A exam. Each of these are huge milestones, and we celebrate them as they’re overcome. The informality of these meetings gives us time to reflect on where the student is at in their Ph.D. plan, as well as to anticipate major milestones for the upcoming year.

What do you believe is the key to success in a productive mentor-mentee relationship?

Realizing that we each have a distinct role to play, but that our research goals are aligned. A shared understanding that we want to make exciting discoveries that push our field forward. And that if there are issues, it’s better to meet them head-on than to let them fester at all.