Office Hours

Off the back of my last article "Finding A Mentor In Data Science", I’ve received good feedback yet I realized I made a schoolboy error. I didn’t detail well enough the things that one ought to look for in their Data Science mentor.
Therefore, this post will cover the various things one should seek when they attempt to find their mentor.
As previously stated, mentors can help you excel faster in your career in many ways. Whether it is boosting your confidence to take on new challenges, developing your skill sets by sharing their knowledge, or opening other doors, it is fair to say that having a good mentor would cut years off your learning.
Connection
Having a virtual mentor is great – by this, I mean someone that you do not have access to for one reason or another, but they have tons of content online to be consumed (i.e. Andrew Ng )— however, there comes a time where you may wish to find a mentor that you can work with closely, so the feedback loops are faster, more specific and more personalized to you.
Considering you’ll be working closely with a mentor, as is often the case, you would want to have someone you connect with. The last thing you want to have is a forced relationship with someone pretending to care about your career. Okay, maybe that’s harsh. They probably do care that you do well, but if you are disconnected from someone it’s hard to obey them.
"Getting to know someone takes time and consistent effort to develop a relationship to a sincere place where valuable feedback is positively provocative and effective."
Just because someone has tons of followers, or is a good practitioner overall, does not qualify them to be suitable to be your mentor. You ought to be able to connect with them and have a strong bond that will make for seamless and authentic communication.
A Different Hat
If your Data Science mentor is to aid you in stepping outside your comfort zone, they ought to be outside your comfort zone. In the book "Six thinking hats" by Edward De Bono, the author argues that when things are looked at by a homogeneous group of people, it is much easier to overlook valuable aspects that contribute to the entirety of something.
Hence, a mentor with a truly different perspective (of which the various perspectives are referred to as hats in the book) could really help you in seeing a fuller picture…
"The idea here is that having someone look at you from an entirely unfamiliar perspective, which may feel uncomfortable, would alter your vision in a way that allows you to see the scope of things clearer."
To narrow it down, having a mentor that wears a different hat or has a different perspective means that they are diverse to you. They didn’t necessarily take the same courses as you, didn’t necessarily grow up like you, aren’t necessarily the same race as you, or aren’t necessarily the same gender as you, and so on.
Skill
The role of a mentor is to navigate you on your journey, thereby they’d have some clarity of the route. Typically, you’d want your mentor to be considered an expert and in the same field. I understand some may disagree here and I am open to hearing what they have to say, however, I am strict on this. One reason is due to the fact that sitting under a credible expert in your field (I.e. a Data Scientist) allows you to leverage off their credibility. Additionally, it would be challenging to take a Machine Learning problem to your Life mentor (hypothetically speaking) and expect them to sit with you and provide strategies to figure it out.
Trust
Mentors may be viewed as father/mother figures (also as a sibling considering the age range is much closer) in the eye of the mentee. I make this point to illustrate the level of trust that is required of a mentor. It’s likely you’ll be opening up about things that are close to your heart to this person, and you’d do so in the full confidence that they have your best interest at heart.
"For trust to be effective, it has to be mutual. The same way trust is expected of your mentor, they will be seeking the same of you."
Wrap Up
At the end of the day, we all know what value having a mentor could bring to our lives. Therefore, it’s essential we seek out mentors that challenge us to improve in ways beyond our technical ability. Additionally, good mentors in Data Science thrive off challenging questions because this allows them to think of their own process as they answer. The mentor that will help you succeed would not be afraid to give you critical feedback, whether positive or negative, and you should be open to receiving it.
Hopefully, this post can help you to see why going to someone purely based on something you’ve seen them accomplish, i.e. wining a kaggle competition for example, is not enough to justify why someone should be your mentor.
Let’s continue the conversation on LinkedIn…
Kurtis Pykes – Data Scientist – Freelance, self-employed | LinkedIn