Written by:
Ashley A. Schantz, Sr. Director of Undergraduate Education, Life Design Lab
Jason Trageser, PhD, Director of Undergraduate Studies, Neuroscience
Scientists need to be able to communicate their research to a broad audience. This is essential because everyone benefits from understanding not only the results of exciting scientific research but also understanding the scientific process itself. Critically, when people understand the process and goals of science, they can more readily see the value in research. Unfortunately, scientists are not always the greatest communicators. Particularly when it comes to speaking to an audience with little or no scientific background. Providing students with an opportunity to learn and practice the skills needed to communicate to a broad non-scientist audience is the goal of Scientific Communications.
Scientific Communications was developed over a decade ago based on the realization that students were not necessarily gaining the skills needed to discuss their work with those outside the field of neuroscience. The course was designed as a two-semester class, recognizing that when students first enroll, they might have only recently started working on a research project. As a result, the students themselves might not yet have a complete grasp of all the important details and nuances of their research project. As the students continue with their research over the course of two semesters, they gain the knowledge and understanding needed to describe their work at a sophisticated level.
Critically, this knowledge and understanding comes from within the framework of interacting with people in the student’s lab environment; essentially experts in the field, principal investigators, post-docs and graduate students. While neuroscience majors receive excellent mentorship in their lab when it comes to discussing their work with an audience having a firm grasp of science, they do not necessarily gain the skills needed to communicatee with someone who may not have much more than a high school background in science. Through the Scientific Communications course, students learn oral communication skills specifically aimed at thinking critically about how to distill a complex scientific project into a narrative story that is engaging and conceptually easy to understand. This requires not only thinking critically about how to replace technical jargon with more accessible language but also thinking about the logic and narrative thread of their research. By the end of the course, students can thoughtfully convey the big picture goals of their research project and link those goals to tangible outcomes with an eye on relating their work to the interests of a broad audience.
Recently, the University, through the CUE2 initiative, has stressed the desire to embed more formal mentoring into all the majors. To supplement the mentoring students are receiving in their labs, the neuroscience major sought to come up with creative ways to embed mentoring into its curriculum. Given that Scientific Communication is a small class of about 12 students focusing on communication, we thought it would be great to build out the course to include a structured mentoring component. We reasoned that since students come primed with the expectations of discussing their work, they would also be more willing to engage in discussions about their long-term goals and aspirations. With this goal in mind, we partnered with Ashley Schantz from Life Design who developed a workshop that focused on the connection between networking and mentoring. We formally converted the course to Scientific Communications and Mentoring in the fall of 2023 and began running the one-day workshop.
Lesson Overview
Finding the right mentor is a deeply personal decision for both the mentee and mentor, as it involves aligning values, goals, and communication styles. Each party must assess compatibility and mutual benefit to ensure a fulfilling and productive mentorship journey. Establishing effective mentorship relationships hinges on two fundamental prerequisites. Firstly, individuals must cultivate self-awareness regarding their personal and professional aspirations, coupled with a clear understanding of what they seek from a mentor. Secondly, they must have the opportunity and access to a diverse network of individuals, thereby expanding the pool of potential mentors and fostering meaningful connections through proactive networking. This course aims to redefine students’ perspective on networking, guiding them towards the core principles of connection-building that remain consistent across diverse networking settings.
It’s fairly common for networking workshops to begin by asking students to identify existing biases and assumptions about networking. What typically follows are a handful of slides correcting these core beliefs, with the hope that a cognitive reframe offered by an authority figure is enough to inspire a complete reformation in student’s willingness to network. While the first few minutes of this course are dedicated to providing the statistical realities of job and career advancement resulting from networking, insights from learning, development, and psychological disciplines affirm that merely understanding a concept on a surface level is inadequate for fostering profound and enduring learning.
The Life Design approach to networking does just that. Rooted in design thinking principles, Life Design encourages students to reflect, reframe, and test things out in order to gain further clarity, direction, and uncover further opportunities for growth and advancement. The classroom activity outlined below offers an example of this approach.
Step 1: Curiosity Mind Mapping
Mind Mapping is a design tool used to quickly capture and transform ideas into plans. For this particular activity, students are invited to map out all their “aspirational pathways.” These are pathways that represent curiosities or interest they have considered pursuing upon graduation. There is a large portion of these neuroscience majors who were fairly confident in their plans to pursue medical school. Even these students, have a degree of uncertainty in the decisions ahead to benefit from this practice. While medical school may be a clear destination, these students still need to explore possible medical specializations, medical school preferences, and gap year opportunities. During this step, students are gently reminded to identify all of their curiosities, even those that do not have a clear professional pathway. Life Design encourage students to think holistically about who they are and who they are becoming. For each “aspirational pathway” charted, students are instructed to list everything they know about actualizing that pathway. What are the steps and skills needed to achieve that desired outcome. Perhaps more importantly, students are asked to jot down what they may not know about that particular pathway. These questions and uncertainties are excellent intervention points for potential mentors.
Step 2: Stakeholder Mapping
Another classic design thinking tool, stakeholder mapping is helpful anytime it becomes imperative for people or organizations who need to think strategically about who may have a vested interest in their goals, objectives, and success. Within the context of this activity, it is utilized to help students think more deeply about the people and organizations available to the to help provide insight into some of the aspirations they identified on their Curiosity Map. After listing the people central to their lives, either currently or from their past, who could offer them some insight, they are instructed to think through the direct contacts of each central stakeholder. For example, a student may identify a graduate student in their research lab as a central contact. A direct contact would then represent anyone within that graduate student’s network, their faculty contacts, the peers in their graduate program, etc. From here, students are asked to identify the stakeholders along the outer perimeter of their map, representing their dream contacts. These could be Rockstar researchers, faculty from their medical schools of interest, etc. We try to help students view these stakeholder maps as an ever-expanding project as they continue to network. An important note: it is no longer helpful to describe this step as playing six degrees of Kevin Bacon as most of the students no longer understand the reference. We played six degrees of Arianna Grande instead.
Stakeholder Mapping is a critical process in helping students reframe their beliefs about network accessibility and about their own self-efficacy for expanding their network. Without this process, it is quite common for our students to underestimate the amount of support available to them and overlook opportunities to receive guidance. Students have consistently expressed being pleasantly surprised to discover the richness within their existing network.
Step 3: Talk to Each Other!
The final step in this process is to offer students an opportunity to talk to each other. They are given twenty minutes to share their aspirations from their Curiosity Map with different partners. Throughout each conversation, students are encouraged to listen, ask follow-up questions, and find shared interests. Following the conversation, partners names and contact information are documented in the “central” ring of their stakeholder map. Furthermore, each partner is instructed to identify someone in their own network who may be a helpful contact for their partner. Though not required, we also encourage students to consider sending an introductory email on behalf of their partner to help them expand their network.
The Debrief:
After their conversations, students are a little surprised to learn they spent 20 minutes having a positive experience networking. To solidify this point, we ask them to share how they would describe networking after this experience. “Easy,” “based on interests,” “about genuine connections,” “fun to learn about others interests even if they differ from mine,” and “exciting,” are all ways students described networking after their peer discussions. Students leave this activity with an embodied understanding that genuine curiosity is both the essence of successful networking and the fertile ground for which reciprocal relationships to grow. By offering an opportunity to directly experience this fundamental aspect, students can be better positioned to engage in more conventional networking workshops, which typically concentrate on the technical mechanics of networking in more formal settings.
The session ends by exploring strategies to further develop introductory connections into more lasting mentoring relationships, including thank you messages, ways to initiate future contact, and approaches to setting clear mentoring goals.
Curiosity Conversations:
For homework, students are instructed to conduct one “curiosity conversation,” more commonly known as informational interviews, with someone within their network. Students are encouraged to utilize their stakeholder maps, their discussion partners, and our campus alumni mentoring platform called OneHop to find people to contact. They are given a brief moment to begin crafting open-ended questions to utilize during their curiosity conversation and provided a handout guide for further inspiration.
These conversations are so vital to student exploration and success, the Johns Hopkins University Life Design Lab encourages all students to conduct 4-5 curiosity conversations each academic year.
Student Feedback and Future Direction
In the fall of 2023, 102 students enrolled in the Scientific Communications and Mentoring course. Based on student evaluations we had ~90% of respondents (37 students) say that they found the course useful compared to ~65% (34 respondents) in the spring of 2023 and 75% in the fall of 2022 (30 respondents). Given that the only difference between the fall 2023 course and the previous offerings was the addition of the mentoring component we believe the evaluations suggest that the students greatly benefited from the workshop. The neuroscience program is excited to build on this model of incorporating mentoring into the curriculum. We hope to continue to partner with Life Design to tap into their energy and expertise.
