I Believe in Mentoring
I believe in the life-changing potential of good guidance. Every semester I tell my Sociology students: when I rolled the cosmic dice, I found myself a white male born into a middle-class family who raised me in a genuinely Minnesota-nice suburb. All I had to do to become the professor they see in front of them was not squander the opportunities within my reach.
Students inevitably object, “Dr. Rowland, there must be more to this story!?” The rub, I tell the class, is I accomplished none of it on my own. I was coached, trained, mentored. I am the product of many good mentors.
As a 5 year old boy, I had two unsuspecting mentors, Jason and Jason. They were artistic and rebellious high schoolers. I copied their every move – sometimes literally. You see, they would share their drawings with me, and I took to tracing them. For no reason whatsoever, they encouraged me. “Produce your own works,” they’d say, and I’ve woven art into my everyday life ever since.
Now, mentors benefit from these relationships too. We see ourselves in you and identify with your struggles. I’m grooming a few students for graduate school right now. We attend conferences and publish papers together. Recently, those students told me, “We feel more comfortable with our professors than with our peers.” Those words could have fallen out of my mouth not ten years ago. I passed on the advice I was given: “then join our ranks, become professors -- it’s within your reach.”
Mentorship is always teaching me something new. Students teach me the awesome responsibility of their trust when they say “Dr. Rowland, what do I do next?” They also teach me to stay open-minded. In addition to being a budding journalist, one of my top students is a horror movie expert. He’s convinced me zombies, vampires, and werewolves reveal a lot about contemporary American society. My students teach me generosity; another insists on baking bread for early morning meetings. Just as I want to give something back for the mentoring I received; they want to give back to me for my mentoring.
The time we invest in mentees collects compound interest. Anybody who knows about investments knows the earlier they’re made, the bigger the returns. Because of the Jasons, I had ten years of art experience before I even started high school. We should all invest in somebody and if possible early on.
But being a mentor is not easy. As my dissertation chair Dr. Gieryn or my Little League coach Mr. Baker could tell you, mentoring is time intensive and sometimes frustrating.
It’s never too late to thank a mentor who led to your success. Call a coach. Tell a teacher. Write to somebody who believed in you and tell them about the long-term dividends of all your shared achievements.
I believe in mentoring.
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