In the late afternoon, between the last experiment of the day and the walk home, a certain kind of silence descends upon a research lab. More than in any seminar, something akin to genuine mentoring tends to occur in that silence. That concept is no longer merely a rumor among graduate students at MIT. It’s evolving into something more akin to a practical philosophy.
Over the past two years, the university’s Committed to Caring program, which honors faculty members for mentoring that extends beyond research output, has shown a slight but significant change. Teachers like Nathan Wilmers at MIT Sloan and Rohit Karnik in mechanical engineering do more than just oversee dissertations. On paper, there isn’t much business overlap between the fields they are bridging.
Water filtration and diagnostic tools are the main focus of Karnik’s microfluidics lab, which sounds specialized until you see it in action. It appears that Karnik embraced the fact that one of his students came from a non-engineering background rather than viewing it as a drawback. He encouraged grant applications based on the student’s external viewpoint, allowed the student to enroll in remedial undergraduate courses, and resisted the need to demand immediate results. It took time to develop that patience. It’s the kind of choice that influences a researcher’s thinking for the remainder of their career but doesn’t appear on a resume.
Wilmers, who researches labor markets and wage inequality at Sloan, appears to follow a similar intuition, albeit from a different perspective. According to his students, he normalizes the mistakes associated with learning the “tacit knowledge” of academia—the unwritten rules that no one writes down. That’s a minor but significant difference. Many advisors are willing to accept failure. Students are actively reassured that it is expected by fewer.
This is noteworthy outside of MIT because it appears to support a larger pattern. A recent meta-analysis published in the MIT Sloan Management Review, which examined over 500,000 relocated workers globally, discovered something somewhat paradoxical: formal cultural training had much less of an impact on people’s success than whether or not their immediate supervisor genuinely supported them. Curriculum was outperformed by connections. Briefing materials did not perform as well as belonging.
It’s difficult to ignore the connection between that discovery and the activities taking place in MIT’s own laboratories. Teaching someone a second discipline isn’t really the goal of cross-training in the academic sense. Giving them enough psychological support to endure the discomfort of not yet being proficient at something is the goal. Remedial coursework alone did not lead to Karnik’s student becoming a mechanical engineer. The freedom to fail without losing standing appears to have been more important than the coursework.
There is a temptation to view this as secondary to the “real” research. There is mounting evidence to the contrary. Human support systems influence technical success far more than most institutions are willing to acknowledge, according to wage data, lab retention, and even something as unglamorous as expat employment outcomes.
It’s still unclear if MIT’s strategy works for more than a few giving professors. This kind of mentoring is difficult to enforce. People’s repeated decision to treat their students as complete human beings rather than as research products is largely responsible. It’s not a policy. It’s a habit. Additionally, unlike curricula, habits are not included in any university handbook, though perhaps they ought to be.
