I know this forum is mostly for TAing, but I wasn't sure where the best place for this question would be. Sorry if this is not the right place.
I am a mid-year PhD student in biology. I mostly work with databases/data mining type of stuff.
I have a summer student who has been really great, motivated, and does quality work. I am wondering, at what point are his mistakes due to my ineffectiveness as a mentor? To be more specific, my advisor placed him with me on this project that we are just starting (ie, not an ongoing project). Because it's a new project to me too, I haven't worked out all the kinks myself. So as we are going through this data, I am realizing it's more complicated than I envisioned, and I don't always have a good answer for his questions. What makes it worse is that I started my qualifying exam (written) the same week he arrived in the lab due to poor timing, so I haven't had much time to dedicate to solving these problems. It's getting to the point that we are going back and forth on how to deal with certain issues that keep popping up. I just told him to keep track of the cases that were ambiguous, but due to us having different definitions of what "ambiguous" means, he hasn't kept track of all of them and now neither of us is sure about the quality of the data. We may have to go back and re-do a week or two's worth of work because of this. Is this type of thing par for the course? I remember as an UG and early grad student having to go back and re-do things all the time after I had thought more about them, learning through trial and error, and not getting much help from advisors (on purpose, to "build independence" as they say). So I am not exactly surprised, but he is feeling visibly frustrated and I think part of it is my fault. Thoughts?