Mentors play many roles in your life to help you succeed; these include "guide," "counselor," "advisor," "consultant," "tutor," "teacher," and "guru." A mentor's particular combination of professional expertise, personal style, and approach to facilitating learning influences the kind of mentoring you will receive. He or she will wear several "hats" over the course of your professional development, and might be comfortable wearing many hats at once, or only one or two at a time. Whatever the case, it is important for you to realize that effective mentoring, like wisdom itself, is multidimensional. Familiarity with three core roles mentors play will greatly assist your educational, professional, and personal growth.

Disciplinary guide

As noted earlier, sometimes a faculty member will be both a thesis/dissertation advisor and mentor; in other cases, you may benefit more by having different people carry out each role. Either way, the role of a disciplinary guide is to help you become a contributing member of your discipline. This guidance goes well beyond helping you complete the requirements of your academic program, as important as that is. This guidance is deeper and involves helping you understand how your discipline has evolved as a knowledge enterprise; recognize novel questions; identify innovative ways of engaging undergraduate students through your teaching and collaborative research projects; and see your discipline, its questions and methodologies, in relation to other fields. Another important role of the disciplinary guide is to help you grasp the impact of your discipline on the world outside academe, and to assist you in pursuing the impact you desire to have with your graduate degree.

Skills development consultant

While graduate study, especially at the doctoral level, is about learning to generate knowledge, the pressures for specialization can make you temporarily lose sight of the array of skills you need to succeed both during and after graduate school, in part because of the relative intensity and isolation of research. As a skills consultant, your mentor helps you develop a variety of intellectual and professional skills, including but going beyond those related to research. Some of these are:

• Oral and written communication skills. These include clearly expressing the results of your work; translating field-specific knowledge for application in varied contexts, such as teaching or interacting with the public; and persuading others, such as funders, policy makers, organizations, and conference audiences, of the value of your work.
• Team-oriented skills. Some of the most innovative learning occurs in teams that problem solve collaboratively. Increasingly, complex problems require inter-disciplinary or multidisciplinary solutions. Your mentor can help you develop collaborative, problem-solving skills by organizing group exercises and projects.
• Leadership skills. As a graduate student, you are a prime candidate to become an intellectual leader in any number of settings. Mentors help you expand your potential by inviting you to assume leadership roles throughout graduate study — for example, in seminars, graduate student government, disciplinary societies, outreach to the community, and on departmental or university committees. These activities will help you build people skills — listening to others, shaping ideas, and expressing priorities — which are indispensable for your advancement in any career.

Career consultant

As a career consultant, your mentor should help you develop an evolutionary view of your career, which requires planning, flexibility, and adaptation to change. Informed of the job market realities, an effective mentor finds ways to help you link aspects of your graduate work with other potential mentors beyond your department — alumni or other professionals in colleges, universities, schools, community groups, the private sector, nonprofit organizations, government, and industrial laboratories. Mentors outside your department can help you explore a multitude of career choices, so that you learn how your graduate education translates into various kinds of professional opportunities. With a modest investment of time, you and your mentors can stay abreast of postgraduate employment trends both inside and outside the academy.

It would be impossible for one mentor to fulfill all of these functions equally well. Multiple sources of expertise improve your ability to marshal the many resources you need to meet challenges during and after your graduate education. To make the most of mentoring, have thoughtful discussions with your mentors about the assistance you need to navigate your graduate experience optimally.