Ms. Mentor

Terrified by Graduate Students

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Question: I am the youngest and the only untenured professor in my department at Big Name U. My colleagues seem to like me, and I love my undergraduate teaching and find it affirming. But I'm tormented to the depths of despair by the graduate seminars I have to teach.

Although the students are very respectful and friendly, I feel like a stupid, useless specimen under surveillance. They have so much drive to succeed and be the best in the profession, and I am just too overworked to know how to teach them properly. I feel like I lead a double life. By day, I'm a success with my undergrads. By night, in my seminars, I am an ugly, deformed monster.

Answer: Ms. Mentor suspects you are not monstrous, but just hyperconscientious -- a common malady among successful academics.

Professors, after all, were the all-A students who belonged to the National Honor Society and won the science and spelling and literary awards. In college they made the dean's list and won all the fellowships. A few, at small liberal-arts colleges, even succeeded at sports.

For the smart and ambitious people who become academics, school was a joy and a treat.

Grad school, of course, pricked that bubble a bit -- for it's the boot camp where one learns that one doesn't know everything. Some profs specialize in disdainful remarks: "How could you possibly try to make a credible argument without the ideas of Katzenellenbogen-Hupfersteinberg?"

Abashed, you ran home, googled this overlooked authority, got his books, and learned German so that you could read him in the original. The following week, in seminar, you quoted him: "As everyone knows, Katzenellenbogen-Hupfersteinberg, the major theorist of fricative evasion. ..."

Even your professor looked impressed. You flushed with pleasure and swelled with self-love.

Among the scholarly minded, the opportunity to learn is sublime. And so is the chance to shine and show off.

Then the most diligent and talented -- and lucky -- find themselves teaching, almost always at less prestigious institutions than those they attended. Many will seethe over "watering down" what they learned and taught at High Ivy U. Most will find their students less academically adept than they were, and more hormonally alert (yes, grad school can dry up the sex drive). At Less-Than-Elite University, you may be lucky if half your undergraduates faithfully do the reading. Some won't be able to, because they haven't the vocabulary or the math skills, or they're sleepy from their other jobs.

You, however, are in a dream situation, and -- like most mortals -- unhappy anyway. ("What a whiner," Ms. Mentor hears her readers muttering.)

Ms. Mentor suspects that, like most perfectionists, you're afraid of spontaneity. You think your graduate seminar must always be intense, theoretical, jargon-filled, and professionally perfect. You're wildly researching all the time, terrified that grad students will ask a question you can't answer. (Well, you could snow them with obscure German names, but perhaps you have some integrity.) You're sure your ratty underwear is showing, and you're a charlatan and a fraud.

Such feelings are entirely normal.

But in fact, the best graduate teaching is done by newer academics, who know the minutiae du jour. They've actually read the right journals and worked with grant getters. They know what's hot and what sells and what everybody in the know is twittering about. New faculty members are, by far, the best mentors to indoctrinate grad students into the academic world, with excitement and urgency.

Senior professors, Ms. Mentor has long thought, can contribute most to large survey courses. They know the whole sweep of Western civilization, for some even went to school with Plato and remember when the earth was flat. They remember scientific hoaxes and romantic old names. They know a military quagmire when they see one.

Senior professors are also more at ease in front of a large lecture hall, since they (usually) no longer care whether their students find them fashionable or attractive. If their underwear shows, so what?

Ms. Mentor believes that you are the best qualified to teach graduate seminars in your department. If you don't know something, you can train students to go to the library (as well as the Internet) to find it out. Your willingness to learn new things is a gift to your seminar. Make students your allies in the pursuit of knowledge and you will become their finest role model, the young intellectual who approaches the subject with verve and curiosity.

And while academics tend not to be the prettiest people on earth -- those folks become actors and realtors -- Ms. Mentor is sure you're no "ugly, deformed monster." Jean-Paul Sartre wasn't pretty, and the mythical Kazenellenbogen-Hupfersteinberg never bothered to wear a mask for Halloween.

But you're too smart for that.

Question: I'm leaving Backward University for Greener Pastures U. and would like to tell off Backward for their hopelessly antiquated ideas. Should I spew or let them stew?

Answer: Stew.

SAGE READERS: Several of Ms. Mentor's current correspondents are tormenting themselves over titles. When do they become "Doctor"? Do they have to wait until they walk onstage in their rented robes? And what is the male spouse of a female doctor called?

Ms. Mentor, in her perfect wisdom, rules that you are a doctor once you receive the diploma that says you are one. If you are Dr. Selena Cross, your husband is Mr. Red Cross. Or, better yet, Mr. Red Shoes, for Ms. Mentor thinks it inordinately silly for anyone to change names upon marriage.

Soon enough, someone will ask if you're a "real doctor" or "just a Ph.D." And you will sigh.

As always, Ms. Mentor welcomes queries, gossip, and rants on all aspects of academic culture. She rarely answers letters personally, will not open attachments, and guarantees anonymity to all. If your letter is used, identifying details will be obscured -- which will not, of course, stop your most grandiose colleagues from claiming the column is about them anyway.

She also directs interested readers to her tome, Ms. Mentor's Impeccable Advice for Women in Academia. She invites contributions for a sequel to be directed to all genders.