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Monday, April 16, 2018

Mentoring

Usually, the person I will coach or mentor is not doing something that I would do. Often, the ideology or critical method is different, or it is not my own field. Mentoring is not the creation of disciples, but allowing the person to do his or her own work in the best possible way. Having someone who is too close to one's own interest is not ideal, because then one's personal opinions interfere.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Yes. And this is one of the reasons I don't like the "major professor" model -- where the advisor is the chair of the exam committee and also the dissertation director, AND is someone the student took multiple courses with.

My PhD program was specifically organized not to permit this, so professors didn't clone themselves and students weren't the hothouse flowers of one person. I was shocked in the rest of the country to discover this other model!