Interview with Alison Gopnik
What suggestions do you have for finding and choosing a mentor?
You might want counter-intuitively to work with a younger faculty member rather than an older, famous one. They’ll have both the energy and the motive to mentor and will have a clearer idea of what life will be like for you.
What is the best advice that you received as a graduate student?
I actually got most of my close mentoring from my fellow students who were more advanced than I was, which I think is often true. However, Jerome Bruner, my graduate advisor, was famously good at identifying and encouraging students. I remember Andy Meltzoff, then and now one of my best friends as well as mentors, saying that you should always read the methods section in paper carefully and not just take the word of the results section, let alone the abstract and discussion.
What are the most rewarding and most difficult aspects of being a mentor?
Finding the right balance between guidance and independence is unquestionably the hardest part. I think there's a tendency now, in mentoring as in the related enterprise of caregiving, to micromanage students. A free supportive place for exploration is best, but that's easier said than done. As a biological as well as academic grandmother, I’d say that seeing your students mentor their own students is most rewarding. Grandchildren are the best.
What advice would you give to graduate students who want to have careers in academia?
Focus on doing the work for its own sake, not what you think other people will like or expect. People value originality much more than most students think.
What lessons have you learned as a mentor?
I’ve learned not to make the “fundamental attribution” error of assuming intellectual traits are going to stay fixed over time. A student can actually become imaginative or hard-working or productive over the course of grad school, even if they might not seem that way to begin with. I’ve also learned that there are an amazing variety of ways to be smart and a good scientist, way beyond the “brilliant boy genius” stereotypes I had starting out coming from philosophy.
How has being a mentor/teacher influenced your research?
Without my students, I’d have almost no research. Faculty often have a reflex way of saying, “Of course my students did all the work,” when we give a talk,, but it’s actually quite true, at least in my case. A lab full of diverse people with different strengths can get to intellectual places that no individual could manage.
Interview with Michael Chandler
In my rather dated vernacular, the business of supervision is merely an administrative arrangement according to which some faculty member is sometimes arbitrarily assigned the responsibility of overseeing the academic progress of a given student. Ordinarily, every student has a supervisor; often not one of her or his own choosing. Mentorship, by contrast, is an elective collegial pairing in which some aspiring novice is eager to win the academic support of a more advanced tutor, who in turn, views the often heavy responsibility of shepherding some especially promising novitiate as a worthy commitment to the future. Many students complete their education without the benefit of a mentor, and many faculty mentor no one.
By these, perhaps medieval standards, one does not simply choose a mentor from some available shelf. Rather, students and mentors come together because they see promise in one another. Such arrangements, when they occur, commonly emerge through time, when a student and teacher discover that they have common research goals.
My best research has always take place in collaboration with my best students.