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. @ASA_Religion did a workshop on mentoring advice, and @BradRFulton and I met with a lot of grad students doing really great projects to talk about getting the best out of mentoring. I said I'd repost some of my thoughts here,so here's a thread that you can do with what you will!
1 Know what you need and what you don't know you need. This means knowing your strengths and preferences. Do you need someone to hold you accountable? Do you need someone to give you space? And it means finding people to help with hidden lessons you didn't know you didn't know.
2 Your mentor does not have to be all things! This is especially true for dissertation chairs. It's almost like finding a romantic partner or a city to live in: what are the few non-negotiables for you and what are the things that would be nice but you can get elsewhere?
2 (cont). For most people, the main thing is that their dissertation committee chair knows their substantive area well and is well-respected in the discipline so their letters will be useful when they're on the market. But there are other things people want too. And that's okay!
3. This gets to the next point, how to make a committee. There are lots of thoughts on this, but I think you should try to make sure five roles are covered, and because there are usually three people, some members will be doing double duty here.
3 (cont). The roles are: (1) theory, (2) methods, (3) content, (4) publications, and (5) the game. The first three are pretty obvious. Publications is someone who will read your stuff and help you with the practice of publishing, even co-writing if possible.
3 (cont). "The game" is someone who knows, well, the game. This person can give you tips on how to meet people, who to talk to about X, which journals are fast or slow, what really goes into a campus visit, all of that stuff. It can overlap with publishing, but it's different.
3 (cont). This gets to something I might repeat. When I say "the game" here, there's a way this can be understood really creepily as someone who's just an operator, only meeting people or doing things to get ahead. Don't do that, mostly because it's a miserable way to live.
4. You should definitely co-author with some of your mentors! You learn a ton about the process and get you some lines on your CV. Just make sure that you have some publications that very much show *you* and not just that you help other people with their projects.
4 (cont). When you go on the market, a key thing is your research project and narrative. Definitely co-author with mentors! But make sure you do so in a way that supplements and build your own individual research project. And maybe have a single-author project that shows it too.
4 (cont) Also, it's helpful if your co-author mentor writers for you and makes clear that your contribution to the piece was quite vital for its success. The key thing is your mentor *empowering* you in co-authoring, rather than using you for labor (even if you get a pub).
5. Identify sunk costs. Sometimes mentoring relationships don't work. That's okay.
6. Friendship isn't always necessary. Sometimes people talk about how they are best buddies with their mentors. That's nice, but the key question is are you getting what you need. What are your non-negotiables for a mentoring relationship?
6 (cont).If a deep meaningful relationship is what you need, and you don't have it, then move on. But if good feedback and advice are what you need, and you get them, than don't worry about it! Comparison makes life, especially academic life, pretty miserable. What works, works.
7. BUT: even if you're not getting life mentoring from your advisor, you no need it form somewhere. Make sure you're getting life advice from people you trust, and these might be mentors like parents or little league coaches or cousins or whomever. But you need people.
7 (cont). It's something to think about if you're worried your relationship with your mentor isn't intense enough. Is that because you don't have good enough mentors in other parts of your life? Could you work on that so you're not putting too much weight on your academic mentor?
8. This gets to another thing. The most important mentors in my life are *lateral* mentors, people around my age or life stage who are more experienced than me or better than me at certain things. Mentors don't have to be old to be wise.
9. You're going to mess up. So are your mentors. You can decide what breaks a relationship and so can they but you can also decide what needs to be forgiven and/or forgotten and/or ignored and moved on with. This is why it's important to have multiple mentors, to sort this stuff.
10. Messing up is not the same as abuse. Nobody has a pass to harm you or violate you or make you feel vulnerable.
11. Also, remember that your mentors--whether more formal or more lateral--can be outside the department!
12. E-mail professors whose work you admire, fancy ones sure, but mostly junior faculty and senior grad students whose work you think is cool and who you'd like to get to know and maybe coauthor with. This is how I met a lot of my friends!
13. @BradRFulton had a good point, worth repeating here. Don't bother people with unfinished work. Send your best stuff you can't possible improve and then ask how to make it better or see it in a new way. Even with peers. It's just a sign of respect, even if easy to forget.
14. Don't forget your mentors! We really want to know if you got into that grad school or how the paper turned out, and all of that stuff. Let us know, please!
15. Finally, this gets back to what I said earlier: some of what I said above can appear transactional. Please try to make your mentoring experience meaningful and about the goods of the relationships themselves rather than what you (or your mentor) gets out of them.
Fin: okay, gotta feed a baby. I hope that's helpful, or at least not too annoying! Be well everybody! And check out @JessicaCalarco's book (which i haven't read yet) for I'm sure much better tips than these: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691201092/a-field-guide-to-grad-school
I added to this thread a quick mini-thread thanks to helpful feedback from @polumechanos and @sandravporto: https://twitter.com/jeffguhin/status/1291492331254771712?s=20
