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Women at MUSC share ideas, thoughts  Final articles in a series featuring talented and successful MUSC women and their thoughts on mentoring in the past, present and future.   Mentors come from other disciplines by Heather Woolwine Public Relations Danielle Ripich, Ph.D., remembers what it was like to chase her professional dreams and remain caught up in every day life at the same time. Dr. Danielle Ripich “My parents were teachers and I always did well in school so I was always pretty confident in my academic ability,” she said. “But I wasn’t sure if I was going to make a good parent. Somehow that drove me to motherhood first, prior to really initiating my career development. I can remember going to school and mothering three children, and like many of my peers, we all have the stories about going to the playground and trying to read articles. It wasn’t an easy way for us to take, but women are very intuitive and find a way to achieve what they want to.” A southern Ohio native, Ripich, College of Health Professions dean and College of Medicine professor, received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Cleveland State University before earning a doctorate in speech pathology from Kent State University. “When I began my first job as an assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University (CRWU), the department of Communications Sciences chair went on sabbatical and never came back. My peers felt that I could be the department chair based on my cake-cutting skills,” she laughed. “One of my colleagues said that everyone noticed that during office events, I would always make sure that each piece of cake was equal and that everyone got the same thing. I suppose they felt that I would bring that same style to the department chair position.” While chairing the department and teaching full-time, Ripich came across an interesting mentoring situation. “The head of the theater department was worried about one of his female faculty members not achieving tenure,” she said. “When he asked me to mentor her, I was kind of hesitant because we were from different areas, etc. But when asked to just go have lunch with her, I agreed. We met for lunch once a month and worked on her portfolio, and I helped her create a research project that looked at the difference between two teaching methods for one of her classes. After she wrote up her research, she received tenure. I realized then that mentoring doesn’t have to occur in your particular, narrow field of research. A lot of what women do when they mentor is translational to other fields of interest.” Ripich also mentioned the ease at which some people communicate when they are from different disciplines because there is less fear of repercussion. “Sometimes it enables people to be more open and honest about not having a particular skill, especially for junior faculty who are afraid to admit that to more experienced or high-level colleagues.” After a turn as the associate dean for the College of Arts and Sciences at CWRU, Ripich came to MUSC in 1999 as the College of Health Professions dean where she promoted   interprofessional mentoring upon her arrival. “I like the idea of different professionals mentoring one another,” she said. “Upon coming to MUSC, I arranged junior faculty orientations and assigned mentors to all incoming junior faculty.  Sometimes the mentor is part of the junior person’s program or department, but not always. This seems to work very well from all reports. “  Ripich’s own mentors came from some of the usual channels and were dissertation and master’s thesis advisors. “I chose them because they were demanding and felt that I could learn the most from them in a professional capacity. They challenged me to prove how serious I was about my career. When I was pursuing my doctorate, my advisor said that since I also had a family, maybe I shouldn’t be pushing myself so hard. By expecting less of me and assuming that I couldn’t accomplish everything I needed to, he really motivated me to show everyone that I could do it.” But despite the success reaped from the situation, Ripich believes that expectations in a mentoring relationship need to be determined at the onset of the collaboration. “In my experience as a mentor, if you just set goals for people, they reach them, and then what? If you set a goal and then get the person to look beyond it, in other words, set a stretch goal, then that person can achieve even more. You don’t want to discourage them by setting unattainable goals or having expectations that can’t be met. That’s why it is so important for a mentor to be a good listener and ‘go’ where the mentee is. In turn, mentees must be open, observant and able to produce good work.” Most would agree that a mentoring relationship’s success is directly related to both sides’ ability to articulate what needs must be met, but Ripich believes the issue is more specific for her mentoring style. “If someone comes to me and says, ‘I need help with my writing,’ it’s more difficult for me to figure out what they are really wanting help with. Instead, I prefer for someone to hand me a rough draft and ask me to look it over and get it back to them in a few days. I suppose I’m best at working with a product versus a process.” Ripich is partial to a product-based, more formal mentoring style, but is quick to point out the many benefits of an informal mentoring relationship as well.  She sees the two as intertwined, with formal mentoring relationships dependent on informal introductions. “People on campus, especially women, don’t have enough opportunities to informally share ideas with each other that may lead to formal mentoring relationships,” she said. “There is something about being women in an academic medical center environment that brings us together. A side issue to this is how uncomfortable some men have become mentoring women. There are major sensitivities involved like sexual harassment issues and too much personal talk that has created a kind of chilling effect for men mentoring women. It’s a reality, and if that tension is there when a mentoring relationship begins, then it takes away from the relationship.” Active on numerous committees, the recipient of many honors and awards related to administrative and teaching achievements, and an investigator for many research grants and projects, Ripich credits her ability to multi-task, something she said almost all women are good at, for her professional and personal success. “I can look back over the last 20 years and remember what it was like in those early stages, how daunting and demanding things seemed. My advice is to seek out faculty whose work you like, enjoy your own work, and realize that there is only so much time, so develop the skills that make you professionally valuable.” Mentoring not always on straight, narrow by Heather Woolwine Public Relations When Kit Simpson, Dr.P.H., told her mother that she wanted to go into the medical field, her mother was horrified. Dr. Kit Simpson “I had completed an undergraduate degree in marketing and merchandising and everyone assumed that because it was family tradition that I would pursue that area until I got married,” said Simpson, interim associate dean for Research and professor in the colleges of Health Professions, Pharmacy, and Medicine. “But I was really interested in the medical field. My mother thought it was just terrible to think of me as a career woman. Of course it was a different time in the early 60s.” Even if Simpson’s mom thought it was a bad idea then, certainly Simpson’s accomplishments changed her mind. After leaving her native Denmark with two undergraduate degrees and a medical technology license, Simpson pursued research interests at the Cornell Medical College in New York. “I got my clinical laboratory technology degree partly because I could get a full scholarship and stipend. As I was finishing that degree up, the head of the lab wanted me to stay on and get my master’s. Well, in Denmark you have to have one year of practice after licensure before graduate school so I decided that if I was going to be stuck running a Danish lab for the rest of my life, I should use the year to go abroad,” she said.  Simpson never made it back to Denmark.  Instead, she would earn her master’s and doctorate degrees in health policy and administration with concentrations in financial management and health services research from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Self described as curious and always looking to circumvent professional boredom, Simpson had many mentors throughout her academic and professional development.  And sometimes she frustrated them. “I never quite fit into one particular field, so having one mentor for all of my development never made sense; I would have been mentored down one narrow career path within one field. My background is in business, clinical, lab, and administrative research, and today it all comes together, but some of my individual mentors within those fields said many times that I was ruining my career. Maybe I wasn’t making the correct choices, but I made them the correct choices. Maybe I could have gone farther than I am now if I had stayed in one narrow field but I know it wouldn’t have been nearly as much fun.” Simpson believes there are two types of mentors, one at the peer level and another at the senior level. She always had at least two senior level mentors who could guide her in the content, culture and expectations of a particular field, and someone outside her field for mentoring on human behavior. “You have to respect people for who they are and what they can give to you, because they don’t have to pay you any attention, time, or caring,” she said. “It’s also important to remember that there is no such thing as the perfect person so you have to allow your mentor to be human and have weaknesses, too.” Simpson acknowledged that a mentoring relationship is largely based on trust, and a lot like parenting. “A good mentor always asks questions and listens to the answers. The questions should make the mentee realize what he or she wants without the mentor imposing their own conclusions on them.” Like many other academic professionals, Simpson thinks the establishment of a good mentoring relationship is in part serendipitous, and that even though two people may be assigned to one another, that without chemistry, it’s just another assigned relationship in the workplace. One of the biggest problems that Simpson relates to mentoring is the availability of good mentors. “Sometimes people simply aren’t available because they have to work on their own careers and growth,” she said. “There is only so much time one person can spend on mentoring and in many cases the mentee needs more time than the mentor can afford.” Simpson agrees that it is a good mentor that opens professional doors for someone, as well as helping them into leadership positions and choosing good opportunities for advancement in teaching, research, and service. “In addition, a good mentor can help you cope when you blow it,” she said. “Often times you learn more when you make a mistake than when you do something right.” In terms of research mentoring at MUSC, Simpson sees a complicated path.  “If you have a department with enough senior faculty with research experience committed to mentoring, then mentoring is going to take place naturally,” She said. “But MUSC changed so much in the last 10 years from a teaching institution to a teaching, research and service institution, that there aren’t enough senior faculty to round out every area. You can’t mentor in an area if you haven’t gone through it yourself and that means there aren’t the coattails that mentors usually provide. Small things can make a difference; I see so many junior faculty with schedules that do have free time in them, but it’s not blocked off in large chunks, it’s an hour here or two hours there. You can’t do research a little here and a little there. Without mentors to go to bat for these junior faculty, sometimes they have no voice to change things like schedules or teaching loads. There has to be some focus on research mentoring at the university level because not every department has enough capacity, even if it has the will.”     Friday, March 25, 2005 Catalyst Online is published weekly, updated as needed and improved from time to time by the MUSC Office of Public Relations for the faculty, employees and students of the Medical University of South Carolina. 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