Mentorship

A couple of weeks ago, I had a great conversation with a friend on the way to the airport. We talked about a slew of things and towards the end, we ended up talking about mentor— specifically on going about identifying and building a mentoring relationship that got me thinking. In a lot of ways, mentorship can be constructed in similar ways to networking (which I wrote about here) and being horizontal or vertical, organic or structured, etc. 

An expanded mentorship model

Rather than asking “Who are people you’ve identified as mentors?” I like asking the question “What is the community you see yourself in, as a future mentor?”  I think the former question gets to the heart of the matter— the community with which you belong/contribute and the person you eventually might want to become.

When I first started thinking about building mentors, I spent time “on the lookout” for people, and vacillated between feeling like there no one around me or feeling overwhelmed with both the wealth and limitations of opportunity and potential around me. But I like flipping this question because we’re shifting from an individualistic frame of “what can I get out of this” to a community-centered frame of mind that for me, reiterates the importance of collaborate learning, building, and sharing that occurs through mentorship. I think also helps alleviate the burden, that I often felt/feel about finding “the one” or even “at least one.” 

Mentors and mentorship

Obviously, framing is important and foundational, but there’s also the application of how you go about establishing a mentoring relationship. To get to the “but how do you get this started” point, I had to ask myself a couple of key questions:

• What do I define as mentorship? and/or What do I hope to gain from a mentor? 
  This is a doozy of a question and to be honest, my answer’s always changing depending on the day, time, season, stage, etc. Most of my answers are struggle-based about what issues I’m having and wanting to talk to someone who’s walked the steps before me for both the advice and the acknowledgment of my struggles. Sometimes that means I’m looking for someone who race/gender-wise looks like me; others times, it means I’m looking for someone who was in the academic or professional stage I’m currently in.
  
  
• What is the type of mentoring I’m looking for— logistically?
  (What’s the method for communication? Frequency?) I think one of the things I realized that is that most of my mentors aren’t geographically close to me. As a result, I realize that most of our relationships center around sending emails back and forth and then tying conferences, vacations, as ways to stop by to meet in person.
  
  
• What is the type of mentoring I’m looking for— relationally? 
  Professional realm? Specific position? Life stage? Everything? Some of my mentors and I wind up talking about relationships (which are tied to the issue of prioritization when faced with academic pressures.) Others of mine, we would never talk about it. Ever, haha.

Questions aside, let’s be real about this

So to speak frankly about this, finding mentors is hard. I’ve been lucky to have supervisors and advisors from my various work and academic institutions where the established/formal relationship happened to work. But for the ones that weren’t formal, the first step was taken, usually, by me.

Tip #1: Be organized. I’ll be the first to admit I love lists and charts. Do I have a list of people I know with their interests and emails? LinkedIn is great for this but I think within higher education, our field is pretty lax, so I’ve created a more old-school method of a pretty simple chart. When I meet people at conferences, I make sure to get their business card, stick a post-it note on the back, and write down a few lines about what we talked about for a reminder when I wrote a follow-up email… like 6 weeks/months later.

Tip #2: Figure out who around. Sometimes, you’ll have a drought and it looks like no one is around. Part of what helped for me is to map out who I know. Mark Granovetter wrote about the strength of weak ties, and I think this is really important when you think about not only who is in your network, but also who is in your network’s network. My maps look hideous, like those blown up spider maps we used in our early English classes for brainstorming, but they help me visualize.

Tip #3: Biting the bullet. You will have to make the first step. That’s it. And it sucks and some day, when we’re all in higher positions of power, we can try to change the social structure and dynamics. But for now, we’ll probably be taking the first step and maybe even the first-couple of steps.

Tip #4: Ready, set, go. I have a hard time with cold emails, so usually, when I think about how to start reaching out, it’s usually in-person from conferences, workshops, presentations, talks, etc. (which is why those notes for the follow-up are super important.) For that initial email, I’ve usually been specific about why I wanted to meet and learn about ____. In terms of mentioning mentorship specifically, I usually don’t mention it and see how it organically develops and also not to push pressure on myself to try to make/force it to work.

Tip #5: Keeping the connection. We send tons of emails every day. And when thinking about what types of emails I usually send to my mentors, they’re usually one of the following:

• I’m going to be at ___ location and would love to stop by.
• The appreciation/acknowledgment email because everyone likes to know if another syllabus cited them, or something clicked from an old reading/class, or that you used their advice, etc. My former students have done this for me, and it really is one of the best feelings to get one of these types of emails (which was actually the turning point of me sending more of these out.)
• Congratulations email about a publication, conference keynote, award, promotion, etc. as you hear about them
• An update if there’s a major life transition (like graduating from a program), which is usually tied to a thank you because I can’t be where I am without all the mentors in my life.
• And, of course, other questions, or letters for recommendation requests, etc.
  
  

This is definitely still a learning process for me so if you have any tips or advice, definitely chime in below. In some ways, I feel like this— mentorship, community building— is never-ending, but maybe, it’s suppose to be that way~