Four Points about Mentoring for the First Time

Statistically speaking, it’s not likely that your first job will be at a research-orientated school, with banks of specialists in every imaginable sub-field of a discipline. Instead, you’re likely to find yourself in a department of just a few people, where everyone wears multiple hats, or a department with one person per major field: “I’m the Medieval Historian.” “Shakespeare.” For example, my department has more or less one person for each field, with a little bit of overlap around Shakespeare and in American Lit. I’m the Victorianist.

Most days, then, there’s approximately no one on your campus who both cares about the topic of your research and is knowledgeable about it, or wants to be. And when you find students who care a lot about your area, they often don’t care about your particular interest. (“I like Tennyson and Browning, so your work on the limits of historicism in Victorian fiction doesn’t do it for me.” Or, more commonly, “Oh, you publish in this area, too?”)

But one day, someone knocks at your door because, dammit, they want to know more about psychoanalytic historicism, or about social-problem novels, or whatever it is normal people research. What’s more–they’re a grad student, or writing an honors thesis, or interested in some project that potentially overlaps with your work. Maybe a faculty-student research grant, for example. Look at that: You’re a mentor!

Here are four tips for making that experience successful for you and your student:

• It’s not about you. It’s about a shared interest in some topic/method. It’s easy to confuse the intellectual thrill–finally, someone around here who digs Carlyle!–with a personal one (i.e., “we’re buds,” or, worse, “hey, I wonder if we could hook up?”).
• Remember your Freud. What’s the basic message of parents to children in Freud? Copy me / Be different. And just as that’s a recipe for neurosis, so too is it a mistake to use your role as a platform to enforce orthodoxy or to fight, by proxy, your own battles–whether intellectual or in campus politics. (And, in keeping with the theme that it’s really not all about you, it’s also helpful to remember Freud’s line about “the narcissism of minor differences“: We’re far likely to overrate small differences precisely because they’re undetectable to others. It’s *just* possible that your student’s offbeat interest in some author isn’t a personal slight at all.)
• Be ready to be exposed. If you work intensively with one person, then sooner or later they’ll recognize your tricks. What seem to other students/colleagues to be improvisational bursts of creativity (or whatever) will be revealed as carefully rehearsed and orchestrated, even scripted. If you think that the basis of the mentor/mentee relationship is personal admiration and regard, then you might be worried that this recognition means you’re a fraud, lessened in the student’s eyes. But if you remember that what you’re trying to do is help them learn, then that moment is pedagogically valuable: The classroom dynamic is designed! There’s a point to all this!
• It’s not about you. One of the oddest moments of my career was the time I saw a graduate student here repeat, with uncanny precision, a gesture I associate with my doctoral advisor–one that I didn’t even know that I’d picked up. Influence, in any relationship, goes well beyond those aspects that we usually think of as part of ourselves. It’s best not to worry about that too much: Advising is a mirror, but only a partial one. You want your advisee to do well for their own sake, not because they make you look even more awesome.

There are lots of resources out there about mentoring and advising students, some official, some less so. One of my favorite voices on mentoring and advising is Dr. Crazy of the long-running blog, Reassigned Time. Rather than point to any one post, here’s a handy link to the 100-odd posts from her site that discuss mentoring. Most of ‘em are humanities-orientated, but I suspect that they translate pretty well. Also don’t miss Natalie’s introduction to the ProfHacker series on mentoring, Julie’s post on social media and mentoring graduate students, or Billie’s post on new faculty writing groups.

So, ProfHacker readers: do you have stories or pointers about mentoring? Must-read (or view) resources? Let us know in comments!

Oligatory Friends mentor joke:

Image is by flickr user leighblackall / CC licensed