A junior philosopher on tenure-track writes:
I wonder if you could put a question -anonymously- to your readers, which might interest other (early career) scholars as well. How would you go about finding an academic mentor, specifically to discuss and strategize about scholarly and career-related questions at the tenure-track level? I’d be interested to learn what people in a position to be a mentor think about this: do you consider it something worth your while? Under what conditions? Of course, relationships could develop through research-related activities. But I reckon that there could be mentor-mentee relationships outside of primarily research-related interactions, too. Have some of your readers established such relationships, and have they been fruitful for both parties?
A little background: I am nearing the end of my first year as a TT Assistant Professor and sometimes feel a bit lost with all the scholarly things I could and would like to do, knowing that there isn’t infinite time available, and open questions about the ‘career value’ of my options, which are important because I have personal reasons to seek out a different position than the one I currently have. Maybe part of the problem is also that I seek appointments in newly established or relatively unspecified fields of research that lack explicit norms about what one ought to do to qualify for jobs. I wonder if a dedicated mentoring relationship may help to resolve these questions.
In any case, I want to take this opportunity to express my gratitude again for your service to the profession. Among other things, the PGR made explicit norms and value judgements of the profession that would have been entirely inaccessible to me as an outsider. This helped me select the institution where I pursued my MA, which greatly impacted where I did my PhD, and thus the road I was able to take.
I'll open this for comments from readers, mindful, of course, that it's the dog days of summer, and today is a holiday in the U.S.
With respect to my correspondent's question, I guess I view it as part of my duty as a doctoral adviser to continue to provide guidance and advice long after the PhD. I still provide such advice occasionally to former students who earned their PhD a decade or more ago, and provide it on a regular basis to those who are more recent graduates. Unfortunately, many faculty do not view this as part of their obligations. The other obvious place to look is in your current department: hopefully, you can find one or more tenured colleagues who are willing to help you make choices about professional projects and activities (of course, they would be less good folks to consult about changing jobs). It would be interesting to hear if readers have other ideas.
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