Abstract:

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted higher-education, the training ground of young scientists. A critical aspect of science education is mentorship, yet it is poorly understood and is seldom measured for quality by higher education institutions. The pandemic has the potential to disrupt mentorship relationships and existing literature suggest under-represented minorities are likely to be particularly vulnerable. This study reports the findings of a survey on how senior thesis writers in a life sciences concentration at Harvard perceive their relationships to their faculty mentors during the ongoing COVID19 pandemic. In brief, this study finds that self-reported attitudes towards PIs did not change at a population level relative to recalled perceptions but draws attention to the presence of outliers. This study was not powered to ascertain changes in the perception of mentorship across subpopulations of students. This study also aimed to use theoretical frameworks of mentorship to propose and validate metrics of PI mentorship quality. This study recommends 4 of 5 survey questions used for future validation studies.