Blog 10 - Interview 2 Reflection

Around a week ago, my mentor started his new job at the John D. Cooper Center in Santa Ana.

1. Please explain how you are spending your mentorship time (Is it at a workplace or somewhere else?  Are you shadowing?  Are you able to do tasks that are meaningfully related to the topic?  If so, what?  Are there other people who are experts in the location?  Etc...)

- Lately there's been a massive change with my mentorship and because of this, I haven't been able to attend. More specifically, my mentor got a new job at a paleontological research center in Orange County, so going to his work place is out of the question for me, its just too far. However, I am working with him to set up days during the weekend where I can go over to his home, volunteer together with him at the San Bernardino County Museum, or whatever else we think of. Most of the time at mentorship though, I clean fossils, which is relevant to paleontology because it is the basic type of evidence that a paleontologist uses so in that sense my mentorship is very meaningful. Also, because my mentor and I would be able to work on fossils at his home, I am going to have the opportunity to perhaps actually get to analyze completed fossils (fossil cleaning takes so long so analysis doesn't normally come until much later after the fossil is completely cleaned).

2.  How did you find your mentor?  How did you convince this person to help you?  

- I actually planned ahead for senior project. The story goes like this: one day during the summer before junior year, I realized that I was woefully behind on my community service hours so I began looking to see if there were any museums near my home that I could possibly volunteer at. I grew to like the idea more and more realizing where there's a museum there's probably a curator of paleontology so I searched and searched and I eventually found the San Bernardino County Museum. I signed up to be a volunteer in the Education department in the hopes that one day I would have a chance to meet their curator of paleontology, Dr. Eric Scott. As luck would have it, I came just in time because a few months later the museum opened up a hall of geology which contained a volunteer run fossil cleaning lab that was overseen by Dr. Scott, so in the subsequent training session to learn how to safely clean fossils, I met my future mentor: Dr. Scott. When the time to get a mentor came around, I sent an email to him (in the time between when he became my mentor and when I first met him, I was involved in a few museum events with Dr. Scott), which practically begged him to be mentor, and he agreed to be mentor and better yet he was even excited to start.

3. How would you rate your comfort level with your mentor at this point in your relationship?  How does this relate to the time you've spent so far at mentorship/with this person.

- I feel quite comfortable around Dr. Scott. He's a very funny and kind person, which makes being comfortable really easy to do. So far, I think that the time I've spent with Dr. Scott has been indicative of my relationship with him because during my summer mentorship I've spent large increments of time around him as a shadow and also for cleaning fossils which has shown me his character and I've come to be very happy to have found such a great person to be my mentor.

4. What went well in this interview?  Why do you think so?  What do you still need to improve?  How do you know?  How will you go about it?

- This time around, I think that I asked better questions to my mentor, because I think that with the amount of information about his current status and background that they got me,  I can confidently say that he is an authority in paleontology. As for improvement, I really need to work on my in-interview conversation skills, because, like my first interview, I tended to just sit there and listen to my mentor speak. I know this because this whole interview was pretty much just my mentor speaking and it was very easy to notice that I barely guided the interview. For next interview, I'm going to listen to the other interviews of my peers so that I can perhaps pick up on a few tips to guiding my interviews.

To listen to my full interview pleas click here.