Christine Moravec is the director of research education and the training center at the Lerner Research Institute at the Cleveland Clinic. Moravec says she has no idea where she’d be if it hadn’t been for mentors.
“Kids these days are too hyper about about getting everything right – Always being on the top, being 100 percent right. Every single minute. You’re not going to be and you’re just going to drive yourself crazy. Think about what you like. Think about what you’re going to have fun at and work on those things. I don’t think when I was young that there was so much emphasis on perfection. It was much more about just jumping in.”
Did you have a mentor?
I’ve had a lot of people who have served as mentors in my life, meaning that they’ve been people who were maybe a little more senior in the world I was living in. And I don’t mean older. I just mean someone who had been in the field a little bit longer and who helped me to navigate what it was like to be in that world and the steps I needed to take to be successful in that world that goes all the way back to high school, continues through college, continues through my graduate school career, and even even my career as a young scientist here at the Cleveland Clinic finding people who could sort of, you know, talk the talk and walk the walk and take me through what it was going to take to be a success in this particular field. I’m not sure I would be where I was today without mentors.
What does STEM mean to you?
STEM to me is, you know, it’s certainly a couple of fields joined together, but it’s also kind of a way of looking at the world where you are assessing what’s out there, analyzing it, developing the skills to sort of say, if I wanted to do something, how would I do it?
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