A student leaves a meeting with their advisor energized by a new idea — then gets back to the lab and freezes. Where do I start? What tool do I use? Is this even the right question? For many graduate students in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, the next step begins with Jill Myers or Rory Walsh, two staff members whose mentoring work helps students move from confusion to clarity.

For many students, that kind of support is not simply helpful. It is part of a Life-changing Education: the difference between feeling lost in the hidden curriculum of graduate school and beginning to see oneself as a scientist, scholar, and creator of new knowledge.

This year, two EEB staff members, Dr. Jill Myers, Research Lab Specialist Senior, and Dr. Rory Walsh, Graduate Coordinator for Master's Programs, are being recognized for the extraordinary ways they help students move from uncertainty to confidence.

Myers received the 2026 Kay Beattie Outstanding Individual – Natural Sciences Award, an LSA honor presented to an outstanding employee with more than three years of service to the university who contributes beyond the ordinary fulfillment of their duties and takes on increasing levels of responsibility. The award was established in honor of Kay Beattie, who retired from the LSA Dean’s Office in 2007 after 40 years of service to the University of Michigan. Myers was also nominated for the 2026 University of Michigan Research Staff Leadership Recognition Award, which recognizes research staff whose work helps advance the university’s vital mission.

Walsh was nominated for two honors: the Sister Mary Ambrosia Fitzgerald Mentoring Award, which recognizes individuals who are exemplars of impactful mentorship of STEM students, and the LSA Rising Star Award, designed to recognize an up-and-coming LSA staff member with up to three years of service who has made outstanding contributions beyond the ordinary fulfillment of their role.

For both Myers and Walsh, the recognition reflects a shared commitment: helping students navigate graduate education with more clarity, confidence and support. “I feel lucky enough to be a person doing exactly the job I should be doing,” Walsh said.

 

Mentoring from outside the hierarchy
Walsh’s path to EEB began with a deep interest in mentorship. As a postdoctoral fellow at the Nam Center for Korean Studies, she led an undergraduate fellows program, guiding students through the process of developing and completing original research projects over two semesters.

“I absolutely loved doing it,” Walsh said. “I was using all of my teaching and research skills, but the most rewarding part was the mentoring aspect.”

Students often arrived with only a rough idea of what interested them. Walsh saw their role not as directing students toward a predetermined answer, but as helping them recognize the questions they were already trying to ask. “I would have a conversation and pull out threads and reflect them back,” Walsh said. “Not bringing my perspective too strongly, but helping them find the project they were excited about.”

That experience led Walsh to identify what she saw as a major gap in academic support: mentorship for master’s students. Undergraduate students often have extensive institutional resources, and Ph.D. students typically receive direct mentoring from faculty advisors. Master’s students, Walsh observed, can sometimes fall between those structures. When Walsh saw the EEB position connected to the department’s fully funded master’s program, she felt the role aligned with both their skills and values. “It felt like it was written for me,” Walsh said. “This program enriches the field in a very real way, and it enriches students’ lives. I wanted to be part of that.”

Myers came to U-M as a graduate student in EEB, earning her Ph.D. with Professor Tim James. Like many graduate students, she remembers the excitement of big research ideas — and the loneliness of figuring out how to turn them into reality. “You leave your advisor’s office full of excitement,” Myers said. “Then you get back to the lab and you’re sitting at an empty bench thinking, ‘Where do I start?’”

That memory now shapes her work with students. “I tell new cohorts, ‘I’m Jill. My job is to be the extra mentor I wish I’d had when I was in grad school,’” Myers said.

For Myers and Walsh, their positions are powerful in part because they are not faculty roles. They both emphasized that faculty advisors are essential mentors, but the advisor-student relationship is inherently hierarchical. Staff mentors can occupy a different space — one where students may feel more comfortable being uncertain, vulnerable or imperfect.

“Having been through the process of getting a Ph.D. is crucial to the kind of help we can provide,” Walsh said. “But not being faculty is equally crucial, because it reduces the hierarchical relationship. Students can be vulnerable with us.”

 

Building confidence, one conversation at a time
Walsh works closely with EEB master’s students, helping them build community, define projects and persist through the challenges of graduate research. One of their most impactful practices has been establishing regular cohort meetings. “I almost never prepare anything for those meetings,” Walsh said. “I let the students figure out what they need and what they need to talk about.”

The meetings provide a semi-structured space where students can share what is going well, what is difficult and how they can support one another. Walsh sees the cohort itself as a crucial part of the mentoring structure.

“They’re supporting each other, and I’m chiming in with anything I have to contribute,” Walsh said. “Having that space where it’s our time to talk about what’s hard and how we can get each other through it — I think that matters.”

Walsh has now watched a master’s cohort move from their first day in graduate school to their thesis defenses. The experience has been deeply meaningful.
“Watching that research come to fruition, and knowing that I didn’t contribute to the research itself, but rather to the students’ ability to do it, feel good about it, and get to the finish line — it feels amazing,” Walsh said.

Myers’ mentoring often happens in the daily life of the lab. Her office is next to the lab, and she interacts with students in the spaces where they work, troubleshoot and sometimes panic. That proximity allows her to notice needs and make connections that might otherwise be missed.

“I share the students’ habitat,” Myers said. “The kinds of connections that get made can be things an advisor might otherwise miss.”

Sometimes that means helping students develop outreach ideas. Myers described connecting graduate students who were separately interested in science communication and public engagement. Those conversations helped grow into a project for a summer camp through Women in Science and Engineering, where the students could share science with younger audiences — and be paid for their work.

Other times, mentorship means helping students with concrete research techniques. Myers trains students in molecular biology and lab methods, but she begins by asking what they truly need.

“If a student comes to me and says they need to learn a sequencing technique, I make sure we have an initial conversation about what they really need,” Myers said. “Is this the right tool to get the data they need?”

Then she either trains the student herself or connects them with another graduate student who can gain mentoring experience by teaching the technique.
For students struggling with experiments, Myers offers both technical expertise and perspective.

“Most of the time, science doesn’t work,” Myers said. “Students bring me a bad gel and say, ‘It didn’t work,’ and I say, ‘Okay, great. That means we’ll try something else.’”

Her goal is not to remove difficulty from graduate school, but to remove unnecessary suffering.
“It doesn’t have to be as hard as it is,” Myers said. “Grad school is a time when you’re doing everything for the first time. That’s exciting, but it’s exhausting.”


The mentor they needed
Both Myers and Walsh understand graduate education as a transition: from completing assignments to creating knowledge, from following instructions to trusting one’s own expertise. That transition can be especially challenging for first-generation students and others who may not arrive with an inherited understanding of academic culture.

“Grad school is this incredibly difficult transition between being someone who learns about things and being someone who creates knowledge about things,” Walsh said. “That requires trusting yourself and learning to believe in your own expertise. That’s impossible without people to build you up.”

Myers sees part of her role as demystifying the tools, resources and physical infrastructure of research at U-M: what facilities exist, how to use them, how to pay for them, where to go and whom to ask. Sending a student to an external course can teach a skill, she noted, but students still need to learn how to do that work here, in this space, with U-M’s resources. That kind of local, practical knowledge can save students time, emotional energy and confidence.

“My hope is that they’re graduating faster, getting jobs, and starting their 401(k)s earlier,” Myers said. “That is our responsibility to them, too.”

The awards and nominations recognize individual excellence, but Myers and Walsh’s work also points to something larger: the value of staff mentorship as part of a healthy academic ecosystem. They help students formulate ideas, use resources, recover from failure, build community, and keep going.

Their work is a reminder that Life-changing Education is not only about access to courses, laboratories, field sites, or degree programs. It is also about the people who help students understand that they belong in those spaces — and that they are capable of contributing something new.

Or, as Walsh put it, they help students do the work — and feel capable of doing it.

“We’re not doing the research for them,” Walsh said. “We’re helping them become able to do it.”

For EEB students, that support can make all the difference. And for Myers and Walsh, that is the point.

“Students don’t need to cry,” Myers said. “They need someone who can say, ‘You’re doing everything right, it’s just not optimized yet. Let’s try this next.”