Page 34 - Recommendations-for-biostatisticians-in-managing-and-conducting-medical-research-consultations

6.5 To become a mentor or “educator” in

biostatistics

One of the best ways to learn is to teach and share knowledge with others. It does not mean
a biostatistician will have to recruit a formal mentee or student but most importantly,
he/she must be willing to share knowledge and also to groom his/her peers. Although it is
not mandatory to have many mentees, however the most important thing for a good
biostatistician to do is to share his/her knowledge. This is because sharing knowledge will
not lower a biostatistician’s knowledge level but instead it will further expand his/her
horizon and also strengthen his/her mastery of the knowledge. On the same note, the
author would like to assert that the reputation of a successful biostatistician shall depend
partly on the total number of mentees or students whom they have trained and groomed,
apart from their past achievements in research work (and/or any other personal
achievements).

One of the best platforms for a biostatistician to teach and share is by conducting
frequent research consultation sessions. Through conducting all these consultation
sessions, a biostatistician will have an opportunity to deal with a wide variety of
research problems in widely-differing scenarios; and each of these research
problems can serve as a useful learning point for the biostatistician. Thus, a junior
biostatistician can also make use of these consultation sessions to be a training
session for him/her to hone the skills in biostatistical consulting, so that he/she can
become a better research consultant or biostatistician in the future.