Graduate and postdoctoral trainings are very important and together they should ideally lead to an independent career in research. Therefore, graduate students feel stressed as they look for suitable laboratories to achieve their career goals. To gather information about a lab that would provide an opportunity to practice cutting edge science and a chance to grow as a scientist, students depend on
resources such as university/institute websites, or job advertisements on Nature jobs and Science jobs. Whereas these sources suffice as a basis for available positions, they don’t really provide enough information to help choose the ‘right lab’. These resources fail to highlight if the mentor is suited to research goals of the candidate. Also, it fails to convey if the mentor has time and temperament to train/guide their trainees to have independent career in research. Also, according to new NIH guidelines postdoctoral candidates have only 4 years after graduation to apply for transition grants. At the same time on average postdoctoral candidates spend 8 years as postdoctoral fellows and only less than 10 percent postdoctoral candidates get a faculty position. While looking for a lab to pursue postdoctoral training, postdoctoral aspirants rely either on advice of prospective mentor’s current trainees or their own gut instinct to find the ‘perfect match’ and right chemistry. We at rateyourmentor.com believe that there is an urgent need for resources like our website that can provide a simple search option to look for principal investigators who are pursuing research in line with your interests and are also willing to spend time and energy to develop your research career. Most unique feature of our website is that we provide an objective reviewing opportunity to past and current trainees to share their experiences in laboratory. Our neutral approach in scoring a laboratory and principal investigator is based on a point-based system. Researchers anonymously rate the laboratory on a scale of 1-5 on specified factors like environment, mentorship, career development plan, stability, personality of mentor and general experience during the postdoctoral training. We at rateyourmentor.com believe that it is essential that the personal information of the reviewers is kept anonymous to ensure a fair and objective review. We ask for a valid email address as they submit the review however we do not require the reviewers to register. In order to keep the review process as objective as possible we are not providing an option to write comments. We at rateyourmentor.com believe that the rating cannot be truly objective unless the principal investigators themselves can provide a personalized summary of their own assessment, vision for mentorship as well as research goals. We believe that rateyourmentor.com can be an excellent platform for mentors to attract the right kind of prospective postdoctoral scientists. This will help develop right team of researchers to drive science forward at a meaningful pace.
