Dean Joseph Benoit, The Graduate School, University of North Dakota
In a September 1, 2009 press release, the Council of Graduate Schools (http://www.cgsnet.org) announced the release of a new publication, Ph.D. Completion and Attrition: Findings from Exit Surveys of Ph.D. Completers, along with the statement that: “Recent doctoral recipients report that the availability and quality of mentoring and advising played a major role in their ability to complete the degree.” Other factors contributing to success were non-academic, namely financial support and family support. The findings of this report add to a long list of studies that underscore the impact that advising plays in graduate education. While certain aspects of mentoring are tailored to the unique aspects of a student’s research program, other aspects of mentoring are dependent on the structure that is provided by program faculty.
Another recent CGS publication “Research Student and Supervisor”, promotes the establishment of a framework for graduate students that coincide with three phases of graduate education. Unlike building a permanent structure where the framework is always necessary, the framework for graduate mentoring should be constructed in a manner that starts out rigid before being purposely deconstructed.
Early Framework centers on getting your advisee oriented to graduate study and your discipline. Structure and close guidance are extremely important. Clearly articulate program requirements, ensure that your advisees are enrolling in the right classes, and closely monitor their progress. Assist your advisee in developing a program of study and in formulating a topic proposal. Introduce your student to the profession.
Framework in the middle phase becomes less confining. During this period the advisee should be expected to move from the topic proposal into a period of intense research or creative scholarship. This is a particularly challenging time for both the student and the mentor. You need to provide supervision and your student needs to become increasingly independent. Effective mentoring will require a plan that gradually and seamlessly removes the framework. Sometimes it will be necessary to restore some of the framework before moving forward. Assist your student in building professional ties with your peers through correspondence as well as other appropriate forms of professional exchange and continuously challenge them to develop as scholars. The more you challenge your student, the more he or she will challenge you. I have always enjoyed this phase of mentoring the most.
In the third and final phase of mentoring, your student has reached a point where he/she is operating outside of framework. Your student is now your colleague and intellectual peer. However, your job as a mentor is not complete since your student is ABD (All But Dissertation). These three letters are meaningful to some who are actively engaged in completing their dissertation and detrimental to others who enter an “Abyss Before Disconnecting” from their mentor and their program. The biggest challenge facing you as a mentor is to keep your prodigy on task. Don’t let them enter the abyss and remember that ABD is not completion. Successful mentoring ends with degree completion.
My goal in this short discourse was to provide some insight on a process rather than provide a prescription for mentoring. There is no formula for successful mentoring. As such, I am interested in learning how you approach the process. What specific approaches have you used in early, middle and late phases of advising? Did your approaches achieve the desired outcome?
For more on mentoring graduate students see:
Mentoring Graduate Students
More on Teaching Graduate Students
Another View on Teaching Graduate Students
To follow up on Dean Benoit’s remarks, I’d like to comment on an observation made in the Alice Clark Mentoring Program for new faculty here at UND. Each year I am amazed at how little in their graduate training has been formally done for new PhDs to actually preparing them for the entirety of the job of being a tenure track faculty member. Very few have had any concrete guidance on dealing with that reality and figuring out how to succeed as a new professor. For many—especially those in research intensive fields — there is little preparation for teaching. Most often there is no training in terms of service or advising. And while research is the area where we have the best instruction, most new faculty do not feel well prepared to fulfill their research agenda given the need to establish labs, locate and seek grants, figure out how to manage grad students and understand their departments frequently ill-defined expectations. And this list of duties is just the tip of the iceberg.
So when Joey noted that “Successful mentoring ends with degree completion,” my first thought was that it needs to extend beyond that. We need to think of our graduate students as future colleagues and mentor them in terms of their success in the academic field or profession they are entering. What would you like them to know and do if they were to be an assistant professor entering your department? Teach them that.
I would say that really successful metoring relationships never end, they evole into new colleagial relationships with those who are the future in our fields.
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