You’re the Advisor Now: Mentoring Graduate Student and Advanced Undergraduate Research

For many people, one of the hardest things to get used to in the transition from graduate student to professor is the fact that one now has advisees who are working with you on major projects, like MA theses or senior theses—perhaps even PhD dissertations. Many grad students have already had classroom experience, but advising these types of projects is often a new thing, and it comes when they have just completed a major writing project and been liberated, as it were, from their own advisors. This presentation will focus on this aspect of the student-to-faculty transition. Questions include: How does one wield an advisor’s power responsibly and set reasonable expectations for the students with whom one is working? How can new faculty apply their own recent experiences as students and writers to the mentoring process? How do faculty manage their time so that this type of mentoring—for which there is often no formal compensation—does not stand in the way of other research, teaching, and service responsibilities? What questions should a new faculty member ask about institution-specific expectations for student research so that their advisees produce work that is successful?