After a negative mentoring experience, students are often left confused, unhappy, and unsure of how to move forward in their STEMM career. These experiences can be tricky to navigate and respond to. A negative mentoring relationship should never constitute the end of a student’s STEMM career. Students should feel safe to identify when a mentoring relationship isn’t effective and what they need instead. In this episode, students and postdocs share how they responded to negative experiences, how they were recovered, and what strategies may help prevent these experiences from happening in the first place.