I couple of Thursdays ago I attended a program called “Mentoring Inside/Out” that took place in the Illini Union as a sort of conference in the form of theatrical performances and workshops. It was put on by the graduate college and a group called the CRLT Players, a cadre of researchers who investigate some of the issues and difficulties of mentoring in several forms and break open the discourse with acting, role playing and dialogue.
I actually initially entered the event thinking I could walk away with a few ideas about how I might better connect to and advise Masters students, but rapidly realized it was mostly focused on PhD students… and in turn started to relate my own confused experience caught between Sociology and GSLIS. Several key distinctions were made clear over the course of the program, which evolved between sequences of acting and audience response sessions.
One of these was that there is a definitive difference between an adviser and a mentor; often the two are not the same and arguments are to be had as to if they should be. Some feel that they cannot appropriately advise students without really knowing them, whereas others feel like this may be too much commitment or taint decisions and honest feedback. But if our advisers are not our mentors, who are they?
In my own experience I’ve actually found more guidance from others: teachers who take an interest in what I do, older students who can offer wisdom, work advisers with give me a long leash and the like. This in part has much to do with what happened to me in Sociology, but also perhaps the biggest obstacle to fostering good mentoring relationships: time. Professors aren’t given much in reward for spending time and caring about students and while many of them find arrive at a sort of ‘feel good’ (or worse guilt or defacto obligation inspired) motivation it’s far from sufficient.
A lot of the problems also arise from miscommunication and misinformation. Professors often aren’t aware of what students know, need to know, and most importantly, what they’re thinking and feeling. And vice versa. Students don’t know that they should ask a professor in advance to meet with them instead of just ambushing them in the office, and sometimes they don’t know what to prepare for a session, or even what questions they should be asking. With changing rules and class offerings professors don’t always know what they should be telling their students to do. Many of them are unfamiliar or uncomfortable with informal relationships with their advisees or can’t relate to them. Some have trouble telling a student they don’t have time for them.
Other factors find their way into the mix, like assistance for junior faculty, support and identification for students of color or other minority status (such as women in engineering), and people with split appointments or affiliations.
I couldn’t help but relate all of this to GSLIS. In certain areas we have very strong connections between PhD students and professors. Other areas don’t. In general we have very little going on between MLS and PhD students, largely because of the professional nature of the program, though this shouldn’t be the case as many of our PhD’s were previously in library science. Many of the gaps have to do with time, priority and stage in life– who wants to hang out with 20-somethings when you have a kid at home or a spouse to see? Much of the work the PhD’s do has nothing to do with libraries or practice. There are other symptoms of issues, too. If I walk down the halls of GSLIS I see only a few doors open for random visitors. This may be a reflection of personalities, but also of the environment. Only some professors offer regular office hours for anyone to come visit, and of those only a few post them publicly online. We have a couple of staff members who are formally tasked with taking care of advising and mentoring Masters students formally, but this leaves the PhD’s on their own. The PhD’s make some effort to bring students together with a Friday symposium but this is typically pretty small and doesn’t involve many Masters students or most of the social science related faculty (they are of course invited).
These challenges suspended, the benefits of mentoring are incredible. Most people who’ve found their way to where they are owe much of it to the time and investment in them by others. The informal networks, the people who dare to care deeply about one another, the conversations had over a cup of coffee (or beer?), all of these play an underrated role in fueling inquiry and learning. In some sense it’s our duty, but how can we institutionalize this so it’s not such a drag on people who have culturally and temporally staged inhibitions?
One answer, I think, is what I know as cohorts. I’ve seen them in a few places around this University, and hear they operate well elsewhere. The general idea is to take a given area of research and structure people around this. The effort might span multiple departments and could involve varying funding, mostly dependent on fit and convenience. You might have one or two guiding professors, a few PhD students (who would be their advisees) and possibly a number of Masters students. Together they would form multiple layers of work distribution, guidance and productivity. The professors would provide the overall foresight to the operation, working with PhD’s to invent projects and publish papers on common interests (topics initiated by either, not just professors), which gives the collaboration strength. It’s worth a professor’s time to publish and the new perspectives and related areas of interest brought in by PhD students could help them to widen their range of influence and connection. The PhD students in turn would receive vital experience leading research projects, establish their first published works, and really actively participate to learn what it’s like to be an academic. They could also help to manage and advise masters students, who could spread the load of large-scale projects by conducting research work and providing additional feedback. The entire group would be connected informally as well, sometimes sharing the same projects and papers, sometimes not, engaging in social and personal interests together, attending reading groups, speakers, discussions, conferences and more. This kind of collaboration could be unrelated to funding sources, potentially, as participants could fulfill these needs with other jobs, such as positions teaching, administration or working at jobs outside (such as in the libraries at U of I).
I’m not the first to have this idea. Martin Wolske wants to establish a studio class that would call in graduates from many departments to work together on independent study research and provide feedback to one another. This is a good start, but also only a partial answer—there’s no professor advisers to mentor the students and it doesn’t have any teeth because it doesn’t result in published papers, the hard currency of academia. Martin would like to include grant writing as part of the class, though, and it does, however, engage most of the practice and informal learning opportunities mentioned in the scenario above.
I’d like to see something like this happen in Community Informatics. I know there will be buy-in from Masters students (it can be an activity of the club, essentially), and several of the PhD’s have expressed some interest to me. The missing link, right now, is the professor leadership. Martin’s class may end up filling the hole, but ultimately I think we need faculty support for something like this to be successful and sustainable.
My hope is to create a community informatics research group. We already have a few instances of things happening that are somewhat like this, but I think we could do better. As we walk into next year we’ll have several PhD students pretty strongly associated with our area of research, and I suspect the timing could be right, even if we face some challenges.
Time will tell! I’m starting by talking to a few people about the idea…