Why I do not really have a mentor outside of my roles

When I tell people I do research, they often ask who my mentor is. It is almost always the immediate thought of professors to think, when a high schooler does research, they have a mentor doing the majority of the planning and sometimes even the majority of the work.

This is sort of a clarification of what I think about mentorship and why I don`t have a mentor.

At my roles at Harvard and Oakland, the team leader would naturally guide the team so those roles are sort of exemptions to my claim of not having a mentor.

However, outside of those contexts, I don't have a mentor. This is because I try exploring my curiosity and I like "learning what I need to learn" as I do research, because it helps me learn about every perspective of the problems I solve and in general, learning allows me to conceptualize several more research ideas as I work.