Wise Advisories

I posted last week about bypassing a mentor’s advice against interviewing at a teaching institution. As I’ve reflected on that posting for a few days, I’ve pondered the good advice I received from my mentors. Two things come to mind.

First, they encouraged me to jump into the search process early on, when I had just reached A.B.D. status, even as they warned me explicitly that I was not likely to land a good job at that point. They told me that the search process was sort of a two-stage project, the first stage being the gaining of experience and the broadcasting of my name as a kind of advertising and the second being an earnest pursuit of my initial career appointment.

Next, they strongly urged me to pass up an appointment overseas when I was A.B.D. I had an intriguing offer, and the compensation looked pretty good relative to my graduate assistantship. One of my mentors told me, though, that accepting it while I was A.B.D. would put me into an 80-plus-percent likelihood of never finishing my dissertation because of trouble accessing resources (this was in the days before the Internet had taken over). At the time I thought he was being paranoid. Now I know that he was being judicious.

What was the best advice you ever received from a mentor? Did you realize that it was wise counsel at the time, or did you need a bit more experience to understand it better?