Good Company
Written by Luke Wink-Moran | Photo by Andrey Apoev
Finding a mentor in graduate school isn’t always easy. The need for mentorship varies by discipline, by career goal, and by personal identity; there’s no clear-cut guide to finding your guide through school. But according to two of the leading mentorship experts at UArizona, there are ways students can go about finding a mentor, qualities that make a good mentor, and red flags that might signal a “tor-mentor” students should avoid.
First, “you need to assess your own needs,” says Dr. Z Nicolazzo, Associate Professor of Trans* Studies in Education. “Knowing what you want can help you in terms of approaching possible mentors and can be helpful for mentors letting students know what they can and cannot provide in terms of support. For example, maybe students want help with sorting through the publication process – this is different than, let’s say, understanding how gender and sexuality mark the site of the institution as challenging for queer and trans graduate students.”
Dr. Nicolazzo advises that students should begin their search for a mentor in their local spheres. She says students or professors they’ve taken classes with, other members of their university, and people who share similar interests or epistemological perspectives are all possible options.
Dr. Sonja Lanehart, Professor of Linguistics and staunch advocate for mentoring, says that students might find multiple mentors: “You might be a parent, a single parent, part of a married couple, you might identify with minorities or underrepresented groups. For all of those things you need to have people that can be supportive and be part of a community.”
A large part of Dr. Lanehart’s work centers on mentoring and retaining underrepresented groups, and she believes that reaching out to mentors can help students establish a sense of belonging and community in graduate school.
“For me, as a black woman, the first thing I look for are other black women because I have questions about being a black woman in that space. When I was younger, it was, ‘tell me all the stuff you did for your kid in this space. Where are the doctors?’”
Beyond practical applications, Dr. Lanehart recommends that students seek mentors who create safe spaces where it’s ok to be vulnerable. Many graduate students enter graduate school thinking they should behave a certain way, which keeps them from asking questions or getting help that they need. So finding not just students, but “faculty that you feel comfortable with, who open the door for you and say, ‘Ask me whatever it is you need,’” is extremely important. “You can’t necessarily know who those people are going to be right off the bat,” says Dr. Lanehart, “but be open to those experiences.”
Some students are going respond better to different types of mentorship than others. “My husband is an amazing mentor,” observes Dr Lanehart, “but he’s not going to initiate conversations about personal topics, whereas I want to know your whole background.” Interpersonal compatibility is just one criterion to consider. You mentor must also be compatible with your goals. Some mentors may only want to work with people set on a classic educational career path. If you plan to work in the private sector, or nonprofit, or any other industry, you may want to make sure that your mentor understands that and is still willing to help you.
Every student will have different needs and seek out different mentors to meet them. This variability is one of the reasons it’s so hard to define universal qualities that make a good mentor. But according to Dr. Nicolazzo, good mentors have one quality in common:
“Patience, an ability to reflect back what one hears from mentees, and someone who wants to be good company. As a mentor, I do not seek to tell someone what to do, but often ask: how can I be good company? What do you need, and how can I help you get that, even if it’s not from me?”
On the other hand, there are some things that almost always signal a toxic mentor (a.k.a. tor-mentor). “Tor-mentors are just awful mentors,” explains Dr. Lanehart. “They cause nothing but anxiety and grief for students and do very little for their development as scholars. A lot of them have that trial-by-fire mentality.” Tor-mentors typically don’t help their mentees because they see it as hand-holding. Instead, that use their students to help further their own goals. A tor-mentor might push you to work on their research project while ignoring your professional goals, or even question your dedication to your discipline if you don’t agree with them.
In addition to tor-mentors, there’s another type of mentor students should avoid: overburdened mentors. These are people who just don’t have the bandwidth to help you achieve your goals. It’s not their fault, but if your mentor has too much on their plate, professionally or personally, your career might suffer as a result. If you’re stuck in a negative relationship with a tor-mentor or an overburdened mentor, there’s always one option open to you:
“Get out,” says Dr. Lanehart. “I know a lot of students who thought that once you chose a mentor, that’s who you stick with. They didn’t realize they could request a change. But you can change your advisor. You can change people on your committee at pretty much any given time. Just go to your department chair or DGS, and they can take care of the change. Sometimes, the faculty might even be relieved because they have too much on their plate. If your mentor might take it personally, leverage your relationships with other faculty to avoid backlash. If you’ve found someone else you really want to work with, talk with them. They might be willing to serve as a middle person or advise you on how best to extricate yourself from the situation.”
For mentees, it’s important to remember that mentors aren’t stepping-stones in a career path. Mentors are people you could be getting dinner with twenty years from now, who come to your wedding. The relationship you build should be founded on mutual trust and maintained in a genuine reciprocal way. “The academy tells us we cannot have these sorts of relationships,” says Dr. Nicolazzo, “cannot be good to each other outside of thinking about what someone else can do for us. However, I have seen otherwise – the queer and trans students I am alongside truly do think about how we can build, grow, and learn together, and this is what excites me about mentoring as a practice.”
Students who’d like to learn more about mentoring can reach out to Dr. Lanehart or Nicolazzo for more information. Anyone who wants to learn how to be a better mentor can find resources on the MENTOR Institute’s homepage.