Thanks for starting off our ‘mentorship week’ Ryan.
I wanted to mention a mentorship initiative that Katie Dainty (another KTTC’er) and I have undertaken. Universities and research units always seem to have visiting professors/faculty/speakers so we thought it might be fun to initiate a visiting post-doc program. We are each taking one day and funding the other to visit our respective insititutions. The days are filled with meetings to move our own research forward, educational opportunities, and attendance at institution-specific group meetings. For example, Katie will be the guest speaker at our monthly KT meeting in Ottawa which includes all of the EPOC and Cochrane groups. It will allow her to connect with many new KT people. I will have the opportunity to be a guest lecturer in the KT course that Katie is coordinating at her institution (I get to do the theory lecture- yippee), as well as have a face to face meeting with my KT Canada mentor, Sharon Straus.
We will both be able to further our own research, work on the collaborative research we are doing together, and network with a whole new group of KT scientists. It’s all good.
It was easy to manage this in part because we both have research allowance funding and we can manage to travel Toronto to Ottawa within one day (no accommodation costs) but you have to start somewhere. Maybe we can get creative with funds and continue with a more formal visiting program.
I can report on how things went once our visits are done. I’ll keep you all posted.
Heather
