September 2023: Mentors, Networks, and Pumpkin Spice Lattes

The arrival of September brings the brisk morning air, the seasonal transition to warm autumn colors, and perhaps to your delight or your dismay, the return of the pumpkin spice latte. I’ll admit that it is much to my delight. But I also feel a twinge of sadness in September because it marks the anniversary of the passing of my beloved Ph.D. advisor and mentor in 2019. Like many of you, I’m sure, I had a very close relationship with my graduate school mentor, and we continued to stay in touch long after I left grad school and started my faculty career.

Precisely because of the path of her own academic career, my mentor and her husband did not start a family, and the extended network of her graduate students served as a type of surrogate family. It became a tradition for that network to gather for dinner at our annual professional association conference to get caught up on our lives and careers, and, of course, to see our dear mentor. We, in turn, became a network of support and mentoring for each other and each other’s students.

I modeled my classes, my teaching approaches, and even my professional demeanor after my mentor when I first became a professor and mentor to my own students. But over the years, I realized that what worked for her was not going to work for me or my students, and I eventually charted my own course. As academics, we don’t necessarily receive formal training on how to be a mentor when we are in graduate school, and we model what we learned from our own mentors—for better and, sometimes, for worse. This is one reason why the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity advises graduate students and early career faculty to cultivate a rich network of mentors both on and off their home campus in order to be exposed to a wide range of professional connections, expertise, and styles.

The School of Graduate Studies is hosting a series of faculty workshops on how to be a good mentor. The next session takes place in late October, and you can find information on how to register below. I appreciated hearing from several faculty members last month who shared their “rituals” for the new academic year, and I’d love to hear from any of you who have a memory to share about your mentors. In this issue of “Faculty Notes,” you will also learn about our new faculty, new department chairs, and opportunities to be involved in a number of initiatives on campus including the 10-Step Accessibility Challenge with TTaDA and the Unify Challenge College Bowl.

With warm regards,

Randi Tanglen,                                                                                                                     

Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs