Mentoring is a Fantasy

Towards the end of grad school, I learned a key lesson about academia. I was discussing a draft of a dissertation chapter with my second reader. Although not my adviser, her work was critical for the arguments that I was building about psychological trauma and technology. Toward the end of the conversation, she said something to the effect of, “You know, this chapter could really use more Heidegger.” Inside, my heart sunk a bit. “Great,” I thought, “more to read. And from an author whose work I don’t really know.” But I dutifully wrote, “More Heidegger,” in the margin of a page, and after the meeting, I checked out a copy of The Question Concerning Technology.

I read Heidegger and tried to understand how his views on technology fit into his and my larger projects. It wasn’t especially easy going. And perhaps in the third day of thinking about Heidegger, I had an epiphany that was…

Find a Digital Humanities Mentor through the ACH and DHCommons

If you’re a ProfHacker reader who works in a humanities discipline, there’s a good chance you’re interested in the digital humanities. Last week Brian, Adeline, and I pointed you to three DH workshops at this year’s MLA Convention in Boston that might help you get started in the field. If you’re interested in learning even more about DH, you might also consider requesting a mentor from the Association for Computers and the Humanities’ (ACH) mentoring program. The ACH and DHCommons—a hub for DH collaboration—are proud to announce a new partnership that will make seeking an ACH mentor (or volunteering to be a mentor) simple. You can now request a mentor when you set up a new profile on the DHCommons site.

Here’s the announcement from the ACH and DHCommons:

The Association for Computers and Humanities (ACH) and DHCommons are pleased to announce a partnership meant to broaden the ACH…

The Sociology of Academic Networks

[This is a guest post by Lincoln Mullen, a PhD student at Brandeis University and a historian of religion and early America. He's also one of the organizers of THATCamp New England. You can follow him on Twitter at @lincolnmullen.--@jbj]

I’m a historian who is spending a month in the company of sociologists, studying religious congregations and social change. In crossing these disciplinary boundaries, I’ve been fortunate to read a great deal of sociological works that I would otherwise not encounter. Among these is Randall Collins’s theoretical work, Interaction Ritual Chains (2004).

Collins’s describes his work as a “radical microsociology,” meaning that he theorizes about the rituals by which people interact with others, from large groups, to person-to-person relationships, to the imaginary conversations that a person engages in his or her mind. I’m ambivalent about…

Google Summer of Code 2011

Starting today, students may apply for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2011: applications must be submitted by no later than April 8.

As Jason wrote last year, GSoC is a great opportunity for students to gain experience–and get paid–”working with real-world software development teams and organizations” on open-source projects. According to Google, since 2005 “the program has brought together over 4,500 students and more than more than 4,000 mentors & co-mentors from over 85 countries worldwide.”

Here’s how the process works (again, quoting Jason’s 2010 post):

In general, an organization . . . applies to become a mentoring organization and as part of the application process suggests an “ideas list.” If Google accepts the application, that ideas list becomes a starting point for students to use for their applications to participate in their project. Students apply to the…

Why Not to Set Up a Formal New Faculty Mentoring Program

ProfHacker’s series on mentoring has already included a number of gems of advice that I wish I had been privy to as I began my academic career. I’ve been fairly fortunate, however, to have good mentors at almost every level of my academic career, from my undergraduate days to that year “off” working two full-time jobs to graduate school to my early days as an adjunct and then as an assistant professor. Even as a tenured faculty member and chair of my department, I have been able to rely on the advice and mentoring of other academics I trust and count on. Throughout an academic career stretching over half my life I’ve rarely felt isolated or alone.

I mention all of this as context. Given my long history of having helpful mentors, it is perhaps not surprising that I was particularly interested in the idea of getting junior faculty their own mentors. One of…

Four Points about Mentoring for the First Time

Statistically speaking, it’s not likely that your first job will be at a research-orientated school, with banks of specialists in every imaginable sub-field of a discipline. Instead, you’re likely to find yourself in a department of just a few people, where everyone wears multiple hats, or a department with one person per major field: “I’m the Medieval Historian.” “Shakespeare.” For example, my department has more or less one person for each field, with a little bit of overlap around Shakespeare and in American Lit. I’m the Victorianist.

Most days, then, there’s approximately no one on your campus who both cares about the topic of your research and is knowledgeable about it, or wants to be. And when you find students who care a lot about your area, they often don’t care about your particular interest. (“I like Tennyson and Browning, so your work…

After Amy recently wrote about how social media led her to Prof. Hacker, I was reminded that social media led me to graduate school in the first place. Without a doubt, I would not have started graduate school—nor would I be finishing, I don’t think—without social networking. In this post I will talk about what social networking has meant to me, from the perspective of a graduate student.

The title of this post is “Mentoring Graduate Students Through Social Media” not because it’s a how-to for faculty, but because for me social media has been my default method of receiving mentoring. If you’re reading this as a faculty member and you have a presence online, please recognize that you are probably mentoring students without even knowing it. For my fellow graduate students, recognize that there are plenty of faculty out there who have something to teach you.

I…

The ProfHacker Series on Mentoring

Later this week, ProfHacker begins a series of posts on the topic of mentoring. Mentoring is one of those vague and slippery terms: sometimes you know (good) mentoring when you see or experience it; sometimes you only figure it out in retrospect. Sometimes it becomes a buzzword or the focus of administrative structures; sometimes it represents authentic attempts to nurture and develop potential talent.

This series of posts grew out of some conversations among the ProfHacker contributing writers, who include people at many different levels of academe, and who as individuals have very different experiences with mentoring and being mentored. We hope to create a conversation here on the site that will not only recognize the significance of personal experience, but will also help create strategies, tools, and techniques for mentoring that will help enhance productivity and…