Scaling the Ivory Tower

What is Mentoring?

A mentor is someone who takes a long term interest in the care and development of another person. providing advice based on their knowledge and experience. An Advisor may or may not be a mentor. The Advisor will give guidance on the doctoral program, comment on papers, and review the dissertation. However a mentor will take a wider interest in the student's professional development.

Ideally the graduate student will have more than one mentor to take full advantage of a range of knowledge and experience, and to relieve the burden on any one mentor.

Why Mentor?

Faculty have a great many demands on their time, Why should they devote any time to mentoring?  1) For most professors, it is a great source of professional and personal satisfaction to see their students succeed. 2) Your reputation in the discipline is enhanced by the quality of the students you mentor. 3) If you care about the discipline, you will want the next generation of scholars to be of high quality. 4) The ability of your department to attract quality students will depend on the department’s reputation in mentoring.  5) You cannot read everything, so graduate students can be an excellent source of information about developments in the discipline, such as new books and articles.  6) Your mentees are enlarging your academic network.

What the Role of the Mentor?

The Council of Graduate Schools identified a variety of roles:

1. Advisors, who have career experience and share their knowledge.
2. Supporters, who give emotional and moral encouragement.
3.  Tutors, who give specific feedback on performance.
4.  ‘Masters ‘, who serve as employers to graduate student ‘apprentices.’
5.  Sponsors, who are a source of information and opportunities.
6. Models of identity, who serve as academic role models.

Your role is to assist the graduate student in the transition from student (consumer of knowledge) to colleague (producer of knowledge). You need to decide which of these roles make the most of your abilities and with which you are most comfortable.  It would be impossible for one person to do a great job in all these roles. You can assist the student in finding other mentors: in your department (including retired and adjunct professors), in other departments, at other universities, and among more advanced graduate students.

What is the Mentoring Process?

Each mentor has their own style, and the mentoring process will vary with both mentor and student.   Your style should be made clear to the student.

1. Have an initial meeting when your role is made explicit.
2. Place the responsibility for initiating meetings with the student, but chase them up if they fail to maintain contact.
3. Ask the student to create a timeline of objectives, both short term and long term.
4. State clearly how you want to communicate (during open office hours, in regular formal meetings, informally over coffee, email or in written form).
5. Be clear about availability. Your time is precious, but a small amount of your time can save the student a great deal of their time and unnecessary stress.
6. Balance criticism and praise.

How to Share Your Knowledge

The academy is probably second nature to you now, so you assume it must be obvious to others. It isn’t.  Remember for the student this is a new, puzzling and possibly frightening world.  Here are some specific ways you can share your knowledge. They include:

1. Demystify graduate school, by explaining how it differs from the undergraduate experience.
2. Give advice on how to make effective use of their time.
3. Encourage them to think in the long term, beyond the current class paper.
4. Encourage them to think of the academy as a career and not just a series of papers.
5. Give advice how to network n the academic world.
6. Give advice on how to apply for fellowships and grants.
7. Advise them why, when and where they need to give conference papers, starting with the department and ending up at the main disciplinary conference.
8. Suggest journals they should read regularly.
9. Tell them which associations they should join
10. Give feedback on their teaching and presentations.
11. Give feedback on  their written work
12. Discuss their research ideas.

You do not need to do all these things, but ask the student who is advising them on what.

Go forth and mentor!

Resources

Scaling the Ivory Tower: The Pursuit of an Academic Career

How IHS Program Officers Can Help You

Scholarly Publication Bibliographic Guide

Academic Career Development Bibliographic Guide

Professor Art Carden talks about marketing your work once it's been accepted by an academic journal.

Dr. Carden is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Rhodes College in Memphis, a Research Fellow with the Independent Institute, a Senior Fellow with the Beacon Center of Tennessee, and a regular contributor to Forbes.com and Mises.org.

Filmed at the Institute for Humane Studies' HSF-RC weekend seminar on November 5, 2011.

Transcript:

One of the most exciting things that is going to happen in a career as a scholar is when a paper gets accepted. An editor is going to say this paper is good enough to be published in a professional journal. So what do you do with that? They are probably going to make some editing marks and say we need to fix this, you need to fix that, you need to fix the other thing and then you’ll get page proofs eventually that you have to correct, whatever typesetting mistakes might be out there.

What are you going to want to do with accepted papers? First of all turn around any requested revisions or any requested edits as quickly as possible because you don’t want to delay the appearance of your paper either online or actually in the journal. A second thing that you are going to want to do is let people know that your paper has been accepted, let your friends know, let your family know, let your advisor know, let your colleagues know that your paper is now forthcoming in whatever journal it happens to be forthcoming in and then also let the people in your bibliography know the people you cite let them know that your papers has been accepted that your papers is forthcoming and indeed if you have a pre-print copy of it go ahead and send it to the people in your bibliography.

There might be a very long lag between when your paper is accepted and when it finally appears in print. Fortunately you’re probably going to get an electronic copy early or it might be a online early and you want to go and let people know that this contribution you have made to scholarship now appears and can be used as they try to further the conversation.

Surviving graduate school is tough. Many fail to complete, and everyone goes through tough times. At some point, you will suffer the “imposter syndrome” i.e. ask the question: am I really good enough to succeed on this program? You need a mentor or, even better, several mentors to survive the loneliness of the long distance PhD student. Graduate school is the process where you move from being a student (a consumer of knowledge) to a colleague (a producer of knowledge). You need help in making this transition.

What is Mentoring?

 A mentor is someone who takes a long term interest in your academic career. Ideally your advisor is a mentor, but may not be, and anyway you need more than one. Mentors should 1) provide feedback on your work 2) provide advice on your research 3) advise you on where and how to publish 4) provide feedback on your teaching and presentation skills, 5) advise you on conferences to attend and associations to join, 6) help you to network with other scholars in other institutions 7) advise on how to obtain grants and fellowships 8) give advice when going on the job market.

So a mentor plays a number of roles. You should search for several, 3 or 4, mentors who may be stronger in some roles than in others. They might be other faculty in your department (including retired and adjuncts), professors in another related department, faculty in other universities, advanced graduate students or non-academic sources , such as employers and, of course, IHS.

Mentoring is essential to your success, not a nice addition.

Choosing a Mentor

You need to find a mentor, but remember they need to choose you too. Why would anyone be a mentor? 1) It is a source of job satisfaction that they can contribute to someone’s success. 2) They want to help young scholars contribute to their discipline, especially in topics that interest them. 3) It brings credit to themselves when their mentees are successful. 4) successful graduate students contribute to their own network.

Why do you want a mentor? You need to identify your own goals, strengths and weaknesses. Look at the number of roles above. Which ones do you need? Who can best satisfy those needs you have.

How do you find mentors? 1) You should be familiar with the research, teaching interests, and methodologies of all the faculty in your department. One faculty member might share your research interest; another may teach courses related to your interests; while another may be closer to your methodology. You should research all the faculty on the departmental website. 2) You should attend departmental activities, including social events and lectures. Take the opportunity to introduce yourself to all the faculty. 3) Ask advanced graduate students. 4) Ask your Advisor.

Those First Meetings

The first meeting with a potential mentor should not be explicitly about asking that person to be a mentor, unless you already have a relationship with that person. Treat it as a getting to know you session. You are trying to establish if you are both a good fit. Do ask for specific advice, but do not ask if the person will be a mentor at the very first meeting.

You should go in 1) having identified mutual interests 2) with an idea of your goals 3) ready to initiate the conversation 4) having identified why the potential mentor should be interested in you.

If you decide that you do want that person to be a mentor, ask that person explicitly if they are willing. You need to establish what role you want that person to play. You should establish 1) availability 2) how you want to communicate 3) what support you are seeking, on research, teaching or professional development, 4) whether the mentor will review drafts of your work 5) advice on the job market.

Remember faculty have a variety of demands upon their time. Mentoring is only part of their responsibilities. Do not ask for more than they are willing to provide. Identify what their comparative advantage is for you.

Your Role as a Mentee

You should be clear about your responsibilities as a mentee. They include: 1) the responsibility for initiating meetings is yours, so you may want to agree regular meetings such every 2-3 weeks, 2) know your own schedule of commitments, both long and short term, e.g. when course work has to be completed, when you will give your first conference presentation etc 3) be prepared with your own agenda when you meet. 4) know if the mentor’s primary role is providing feedback on your research or to support professional development, such as which association to join, what publications to read, which conferences to attend etc.

Some relationships do not work out. If there are any problems, discuss them first with the mentor. If you still feel this is unsatisfactory, discuss with other faculty, such as the department chair, on whether it makes sense to change the mentor. Identify alternative mentor before ending the relationship, and establish their willingness to fulfill that role.

Go forth and be mentored!

Resources

Scaling the Ivory Tower: The Pursuit of an Academic Career

How IHS Program Officers Can Help You

Professor Art Carden talks about the value of submitting your research to academic journals.

Dr. Carden is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Rhodes College in Memphis, a Research Fellow with the Independent Institute, a Senior Fellow with the Beacon Center of Tennessee, and a regular contributor to Forbes.com and Mises.org.

Filmed at the Institute for Humane Studies' HSF-RC weekend seminar on November 5, 2011.

Transcript:

As a scholar you are a professional communicator. Part of your job is to write articles, to write books, to write reviews, to write comments, to write in ways that advance the conversation. So what do you do with something that has been written? You have written a paper perhaps for class or you have written a paper for a seminar or you have got comments on something from a faculty member or comments on something from a friend. Maybe you have written a conference paper or something like that. What do you with it?

Well in the words of some of the people in the circles in which travel, put a stamp on it, go ahead and submit it to a journal. Why should you do this? Because the people, who edit the journal and the people who are going to referee your paper are most likely to be the people who are going to benefit from reading your paper and therefore are going to be the people who most likely would be able to tell you what needs to happen in order to get the paper published and in order for the paper to be a real and meaningful contribution. So a paper that is circulating among your friends, you are going to get some comments on it and it is going to be useful, but, a paper that is in the hands of a journal editor and that’s in the hands of referees who are experts in the field in which you are trying to contribute is going to have a much greater chance of making a contribution.