Mentors: Critical, Yet Often Ignored

Graduate education entails several steps: course work, comprehensive exams, and theses/dissertations. It's easy to focus on the steps as items to check mark as completed on your list. Sure grad study entails hurdles, but try to consider the process itself -- the whole rather than the small parts/steps. What's your goal? Developing into a competent professional in your field.

Becoming a competent professional is more complicated than course work. It entails becoming socialized into your discipline. Just as children need guidance from their parents to become socialized into productive members of society, graduate students look to mentors to help them learn the subtleties of professional life. A recent article by Sabrina Bonaparte and Jerry Baldasty in Inside Higher Ed points out that students (and new professionals) should have multiple mentors to provide guidance in multiple areas. No one mentor or professional excels at it all. Look to a small handful of professors or other professionals as models. For example, a student in a field with research and practice components, like clinical psychology, might look for a mentor for guidance on practice issues, another for research issues, and perhaps another to approach for advice and guidance on teaching. Take a look at Finding Mentors at Inside Higher Ed for more advice on locating mentors, setting boundaries, and more.