The first in her family to go to college, Jocelyn Nadeau entered Smith College intending to major in psychology. But Stuart Rosenfeld, a professor of chemistry, changed all that when, in her sophomore year, he took her under his wing and gave her the opportunity to conduct research.

Not only did she get "a realistic picture of research," says the Charlestown, NH, native, but she was also encouraged to think about graduate school. Ten years later, Nadeau, now 30, has joined Marist College as an assistant professor of chemistry after completing a PhD at Brown University and postdoc work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"I got a sense of what [Rosenfeld] did, and I could see myself in his shoes," Nadeau says about her decision to work at a small college. "He led by example."

For Marcus Fairly, who earned a master's degree in bioscience, the decision regarding the direction to follow was a little easier. He knew he wanted to work in industry but didn't quite know how to go about it. So in 2003, Fairly, who is African American, applied to the Biotechnology Institute Organization's (BIO) Minority and Indigenous Fellows Program. The decision proved to be career-making.

He learned important skills such as networking and interviewing during a six-day conference that preceded BIO's annual meeting. More importantly, he was paired with Kate Ferrell of Amgen. For the next year, as the two discussed his future, she encouraged him to visit Amgen in California to learn about the workings of a pharmaceutical company. She set up informational interviews and "helped me filter what I liked to do and what my skills were," says Fairly.

Her experience also taught him that there is more than one career path. "My mentor worked in development and moved into operations," he says. "It helped me understand that it doesn't matter where I get in in industry. What is important is [that] I figure out what I like to do and pursue it. Everything will fall into place."

When it came time for him to look for employment, Ferrell helped him land a job interview at Amgen. Fairly, now 28, was just promoted from quality assurance (QA) associate to QA associate III at Amgen.

Some educational institutions have discovered that mentoring can attract and retain young scientists, especially women and minority researchers. Northwestern University, for example, stepped up its efforts to recruit and mentor minority and female engineers and life scientists after receiving a five-year, $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation in 2004. The grant is part of an effort to triple the number of minority academics in the areas of science, technology, engineering, and math.

The grant allowed the university to create the Science and Engineering Committee on Multicultural Affairs, with five subcommittees focusing on retention, school visits, summer programs, marketing, and finance, says Penny Warren, assistant dean of Minority Affairs.

The funds also gave the university the means to appoint 26 faculty members as Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) professors and 12 minority senior graduate students as AGEP scholars. AGEP professors work on graduating minority PhDs, while AGEP scholars such as Jennifer Hobbes, a fifth-year PhD student in cancer biology, receive small stipends to mentor younger students and help the school recruit minority students. "Every year I've been here, the number of minority students has increased," says Hobbes, who is African American. "I would like to keep that trend going."

People in Industry also understand the importance of mentoring. Pfizer's mentoring program, Catalyst, is available to all research and development workers around the world. Pfizer also sponsors informal groups such as the Women's Leadership Network (WLN) at the company's Groton, Conn., worksite. Financially supported by the company, the WLN holds monthly networking lunches, organizes workshops, and mentors female students at local educational institutions.

"We have a variety of mentoring programs, because the belief is that mentoring is important for sustained career success," says Karen Houseknecht, WLN head and an associate research fellow in the discovery group. "The basic sciences are predominantly male," she adds. "It helps to have mentors and a community as [women] try to figure out how to balance work and family or other outside activities."

GlaxoSmithKline also just started matching young scientists in R&D with mentors via a computer program. But even before then, management teams would meet once a year to evaluate employees and identify those who needed mentoring. "Within that process, we specifically ask managers to bring with them profiles of promising women and minorities," says Nancy Marsh, senior vice president of human resources.

"One of the side benefits of mentoring is relationship development," continues Marsh. "We do so much teamwork and are geographically distributed that it helps make connections between people. The second important aspect is scientific diversity. One of the wonderful things about being global and a mix of cultures and countries and training perspectives is being able to mix different points of view. ... It takes a village to make a product."

The National Institutes of Health also sees the need for mentoring. "I was surprised by the number of applications that were received from people with outstanding pedigrees but were way below what it took to achieve a fundable score," says John Schwab, program director for the division of pharmacology, physiology, and biological chemistry at NIH's National Institute of General Medical Sciences. "It was a huge number of avoidable errors that were being committed - everything from weak choices of research projects to the inability to effectively sell an idea, or out-and-out sloppiness in proposal presentation. I talked to a number of people in the field. As a result of these discussions, I came up with a hypothesis: Mentoring is uneven in this community."

Schwab adds, "We're talking long-term survival skills like selling a project and specifically grantmanship or management of a research group or teaching professional ethics – things that are important but do not directly contribute to PhD students achieving results and getting papers published for his or her boss."

To fix the problems, Schwab and Mike Doyle of the University of Maryland organized a workshop, inviting 28 recommended junior organic chemistry and chemical biology faculty to attend the two-day-long event in May to network with seven senior professors and get feedback from these mentors on their presentations. The workshop proved to be such a success that the NIH has funded it for another four years.

Finding a mentor can be as easy as striking up a conversation. John Anderson, the William H. Drury chair in evolution, ecology, and natural history at the Maine's College of the Atlantic met his mentor, UC-Berkeley professor Ned Johnson, by asking him questions after class.

Or the process could be as formal as being assigned a mentor. While a microbiology student at Pennsylvania's Kutztown University, Jason Skipworth was paired with Maureen Murphy when he accepted a summer internship at Philadelphia's Fox Chase Cancer Center. Skipworth is now working with viruses in another Fox Chase Cancer Center lab while studying for his GRE. The 27-year-old plans to pursue a PhD in viral pathology, cancer biology, or immunology.

Working in Murphy's cell developmental biology lab "was priceless," says Skipworth. "I went to a small school so I didn't get to see what real science was like. I learned that everything didn't work, how to work long hours, the things you need to prepare for, [and] how you can tweak things. She showed me that I could do this."