# The effect of trainee career intentions on mentor’s interest in the trainee: Experimental evidence from academia

## TL;DR

This study finds that mentors in academia do not show less interest in trainees who plan to pursue non-academic careers, contrary to common beliefs.

## Contribution

The paper provides causal evidence using an audit experiment to test how career intentions affect mentorship interest in academia.

## Key findings

- Mentors responded to emails from trainees with different career intentions at similar rates.
- Treatment effects were not influenced by the prestige of the institution or the mentors' industry connections.
- The findings challenge assumptions about how career mismatch affects mentorship.

## Abstract

In many industries trainees often seek careers different from their mentors. For example, many PhD students seek non-academic careers. Anecdotally, mentors invest less in different-career trainees, but causal evidence is lacking. To fill this gap, we conducted an audit experiment in academia, where a fictitious prospective PhD student emailed immunology and microbiology principal investigators (PIs) about mentorship. The student’s career intention was randomly described as “applied research in industry” (n = 1000), “basic research in academia” (n = 1000) or no description (control, n = 442). To mitigate concerns about skills and motivation, all emails highlighted the student’s great academic record. Contrary to expectations, PIs responded at similar rates across all conditions. Treatment effects showed little heterogeneity based on the PIs’ institution prestige, industry connections, and career length. These null findings challenge the widespread belief that mismatched career intentions cause less mentorship (although the two may still be associated) and the mechanisms assumed to drive that effect. Our results call for caution in deploying interventions to fix problems related to advisor-mentee misalignments before clearly establishing their source.