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On Academic Mentoring

1 September 2016 2,506 views No Comment
Murali Haran

Murali Haran

Murali Haran is professor of statistics at Penn State. He earned his PhD from the University of Minnesota School of Statistics. His research includes statistical computing, spatial models, and applications in climate science and infectious diseases. He has advised more than a dozen graduate students and scores of undergraduates. He also has chaired the PSU statistics undergraduate program for four years.

 

David Hunter

David Hunter

David Hunter is the head of the department of statistics at Penn State, where he has been on the faculty since earning his PhD from the University of Michigan in 1999. He was the chair of Penn State’s undergraduate program for a decade prior to becoming department head in 2012. His research on mixture models, models for networks, and computational statistics has helped eight PhD advisees complete their dissertations.

 

The positive outcomes of good mentoring are undeniable. It can enable a successful and satisfying experience not only during the mentorship, but for a long time thereafter, once the mentee embarks on a career. From the mentor’s perspective, a successful advising relationship can lead to great rewards, both tangible and intangible, including a lasting, positive relationship with the mentee, future mutually beneficial productivity, and the personal satisfaction one can derive from a job well done.

We think most academics would agree with these statements, yet, in our experience, it is typical that little effort is made to provide mentors with the tools needed to mentor successfully. One might ask whether it is possible to “teach” someone to be a good mentor any more than it is possible to teach someone to be a nice person. However, we believe effective mentoring is a skill that can be honed by anyone who is genuinely interested in doing so.

There are many levels of mentoring, from guiding a graduate student’s dissertation to advising undergraduates to helping junior faculty members adjust to academic life. For this brief article, we mostly write about graduate student advising, but much of what we describe applies more generally. Here are a few principles based on our personal experiences, both as mentors and mentees.

Individualized Approaches

It is rare that two students can be mentored in exactly the same way. It is therefore critical to pay attention to the individual’s interests, capabilities, and personality. For example, a student who is independent and thrives when she is given space to be creative should not be micromanaged. On the other hand, a student who needs guidance should be provided with adequate structure. Of course, as academics, we are trained to be experts in our subject, not experts in reading people. But our point is that one’s outlook on mentoring need not be rigid; it is okay to tailor the approach to the student, to try new ideas, to improvise.

There will be some basic tenets you find are unwilling to change (many of our own will become clear in the paragraphs below), but approaching mentoring with an eye toward flexibility encourages reflection about the process itself, which can only lead to better results.

Role Modeling

Do not lose sight of the fact that part of the mentor’s job is to help the mentee understand the role of a mentor. After all, today’s advisees become tomorrow’s advisers! Thus, one’s mentoring impact—good or bad—can be passed down through multiple academic generations. This effect is particularly strong when one’s advisees are at the start of their careers and have not yet formed strong individualized opinions about mentoring (or read enough Amstat News articles on the subject!).

Availability and Proactivity

You must make yourself available to your advisees. Of course, for you to get work done, you cannot be available at all times. But if you have regular times when you are available and make your availabilities clear to your students, that will play a major role in their knowing that you care and are interested in helping. Yet it is typically not enough to merely let your students know you are available for meetings; you must often actively initiate conversations with them. Except in cases of unusually self-motivated advisees, scheduling regular meetings is crucial, and occasionally dropping an unsolicited, neutral inquiry (how are things going?)—either by email or in person—can be beneficial.

Focus on the Work

Try to keep the mentoring relationship almost entirely about the work you are engaged in, avoiding the temptation to offer advice on topics unrelated to the work. (This is especially relevant for grad advising.) What we mean is that it is not unusual for advisers to say things like, “My student is not good at selling his work; he needs to become bolder.” Or, “She is quite arrogant; I need to put her in her place.” Instead of actually trying to change the student’s personality, it is best to actually focus on how the student’s talks or writing are not hitting the right note.

For instance, if you get your student to communicate clearly, he will end up marketing his work better. If the student is problematic in one-on-one interactions, clearly stating exactly what needs to change in those interactions is more valuable than telling the student how to change his personality. This works better both in terms of minimizing conflict and actually getting the student to change a behavior. Focusing on the work also helps avoid making things too personal (see next point).

Boundaries

While it is prudent to recognize that a student’s personal life may have an impact on her academic life, it is also important to respect the boundary between the personal and the professional. The relationship between a student and an adviser is not a relationship of equals; the adviser is in a position of power relative to the student. It is therefore vital to keep any personal discussions strictly cordial, if not avoiding them altogether. When in doubt, err on the side of keeping the personal out of the conversation, and direct involvement in the personal lives of one’s advisees should really be avoided. It is absolutely possible to be a nurturing, caring mentor while avoiding roles beyond academics.

Empowerment

Remind the mentee that she has more power than she may realize. Mentees often feel like they are powerless, especially if they have received funding from their adviser. Remind students that they always have a choice and can look for a different adviser if things do not seem to be working out.

Learning from Experience

Discuss your mentoring with your peers! No matter how experienced you are, it is often well worth talking to a colleague, senior or junior, about new ideas, tricky mentoring situations, or anecdotes about approaches that worked well (it is worth seeking good mentors for the mentoring process). It is also helpful to be deliberate about learning from past experience; one can learn from past students as well as from their own experience as a mentee. For instance, if you feel you did not read as extensively on your research area as you should have while you were a PhD student, your “mentoring reminders” document could have a template on how to read and summarize papers. This is something you could share routinely with your new students while regularly suggesting new papers for them to read.

High Standards and Kindness Are Compatible

We believe being kind is an essential quality of any good adviser. Furthermore, while it is also important to maintain high standards, this is not incompatible with being kind to the student. For instance, if your student’s simulation study or theoretical results are not as thorough as you would like, it may be the case that you will not let him take the next step in his graduate career (e.g., delaying his thesis proposal); however, you should provide lots of guidance, resources, and encouragement all along.

In general, patience is a virtue for a good mentor. On the rare occasion it appears the student is unlikely to ever meet the high standards you set, working hard to help the student figure out alternatives to the path she has chosen may actually be the kind approach.

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