V. Common Themes Among Graduate Students
While all graduate students have unique needs, goals, and expectations, they do share some common concerns about their graduate experience. Good mentoring can help students address and resolve these concerns. This section helps you understand how your students' mentoring needs may be similar to those of their peers and how you can provide advice in addressing them.
On this page
- Need for role models
- Questioning the canons
- Fear of being categorized as a "single-issue" scholar
- Feelings of isolation
- Burden of being a spokesperson
- Balancing work and lifestyle
Need for role models
- If the composition of faculty and graduate students in your department is homogenous, help identify and recruit new members who represent diverse backgrounds.
- Hold departmental discussions on how to provide educational and work climates that welcome contributions from all members.
- Become familiar with people across the University or at other universities who can help your protégés.
- Know that you can provide excellent mentoring to students of different gender, race, or culture from you. What is most important is focusing on what students need in order to learn and accomplish their goals.
All graduate students benefit from role models they can admire — professionals whose lives they may want to emulate. Quite often, people identify role models based on shared outlook and connections to similar experiences.
Although the composition of faculty at UNL is becoming more diverse, students from historically underrepresented or marginalized groups, and women in some disciplines, may face greater challenges finding faculty role models who have had experiences similar to their own. Some students convey that they hope to find "someone who looks like me," "someone who immediately understands my experiences and perspectives," "someone whose very presence lets me know I, too, can make it in the academy." Even so, while shared background and experiences are important, they do not "guarantee" a good mentoring relationship. What is key are shared interests and interpersonal compatibility. All students also benefit from reaching out to potential mentors who are different from them in race, gender, or other characteristics.
Questioning the canons
- Listen to students' experiences and perspectives. Ask them to share scholarly articles or essays that illustrate the work they would like to do.
- Identify content that is traditionally excluded or marginalized in your field and expand the boundaries of your discipline by addressing it.
- Help your students learn about the many interdisciplinary communities of scholars that exist on campus.
- Foster ongoing departmental discussions on how disciplinary and interdisciplinary theory and methodology are changing because of the inclusion of more diverse content, approaches, and perspectives.
To do adventuresome academic work, students need to question the implicit assumptions and ways of knowing in their disciplines. Indeed, it is because of this kind of questioning that disciplines evolve.
Sometimes students find that their perspectives or intellectual interests do not fit neatly into the current academic canons. For instance, interest in interdisciplinary questions and the social applications of knowledge is growing, but the structure of some programs makes it difficult for students to pursue these questions in their research and teaching. Studies suggest that underrepresented students experience this disjuncture more keenly; however, majority students face it as well. Productive scholarly environments value new ways of thinking and encouraging students to explore, and possibly challenge, different models of inquiry.
Fear of being categorized as a "single-issue" scholar
- Ask students what their research interests are rather than assume that their interests are driven only by personal characteristics.
- Find out what motivates your students. Then, help them learn how to use sound disciplinary concepts and theories to frame the issues that drive their intellectual curiosity.
- Discuss with your students how race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and other characteristics expand the types of questions asked in your discipline and the tools used for answering them.
- Help students practice job talks and interview responses that illustrate the depth and breadth of their research interests.
- Encourage students to anticipate skeptics' responses to their topics and to plan ahead for addressing them.
Some students are concerned that if they select questions of gender, race, sexual orientation, or the content of marginalized cultures as their thesis/dissertation topics, faculty will assume they are interested in pursuing only these topics for their entire career or will question the relevance of their work.
If your students are passionate about such questions in their research and teaching, help them bolster the scholarly nature of their agenda.
Feelings of isolation
- Encourage students to attend departmental functions and form study or writing groups.
- Be aware of students who seem to experience difficulty taking active roles in departmental settings and find ways to include them. Ask them about their research interests, hobbies, activities, and avocations.
- Introduce your students to others with complementary interests, regardless of their background.
- Remind students of the wealth of organizations on and off campus that provide a sense of community, e.g., cultural and religious groups, reading groups, professional associations, and varied resources of the Office of Graduate Studies.
At times, graduate study can be an isolating endeavor. Isolation from other students or one's home community may lead students to loneliness and self-doubt.
If it goes unchecked, isolation can lead to depression or dropping out. Depending on the discipline, students from historically underrepresented groups or women might feel more isolated than other students, especially if the composition of students, faculty, and content in the department is highly homogenous.
Burden of being a spokesperson
- Avoid assuming that the "white male" experience is the norm. Understand how race, gender, and other characteristics influence, but do not predetermine, your students' perspectives on intellectual problems or issues.
- Avoid asking students to speak as spokespersons for the group to which you perceive they belong. Simply ask for their perspective.
- When you hear students voluntarily taking on spokesperson roles, acknowledge what you have gained from their contributions to the discussion.
It is unfair to assume that any one student represents the experiences or beliefs of an entire group.
When certain issues arise in classroom or theoretical discussions, especially those relating to race, class, or gender, the pressures of being a spokesperson arise. These pressures tend to burden underrepresented students more than others. Consider the pressures put on a woman in an engineering seminar if she were asked, "How would a woman approach this design problem?" or on the man in a feminist theory class if he were asked to provide "the male perspective."
Balancing work and lifestyle
- Demonstrate to students that you value each dimension of your life. Be open to bringing up your interests and hobbies. Share your thoughts about the benefits of balancing work and life to refresh and regroup.
- Offer your students tips on managing time wisely and help them understand that large tasks can be broken down into more time manageable components.
- Recognize that students work hard to balance school and home demands. Those with family responsibilities are not able to spend as many hours on campus as other students, but often can be better focused when they are there.
- Learn something about the demands your students face beyond the department. If you sense that a student is encountering difficulties, listen first and offer ideas for solutions. Or, guide the student to appropriate campus resources.
Students from all disciplines observe that professors devote large parts of their lives to their work in order to be successful in the academy.
In turn, students who feel that faculty expect them to spend every waking minute on their work can become overwhelmed. This feeling causes concern for those seeking to balance success in their graduate career with other interests and responsibilities, such as family and outside work.
