6 - Leverage Student Mentoring

Summary

Productive scholars rarely publish alone. They collaborate on about 90 percent of their works, and mostly with students. Students carry much of the collaborative workload, steer faculty toward new and interesting research paths, and bring energy to projects and professors. Productive scholars are talent scouts, mining diamond-in-the-rough student collaborators found among their advisees, research assistants, and floaters who join projects outside their advisor’s. Although student advising offers opportunity to train the next generation of scholars and to expand one’s own research interests and productivity, student advising can prove onerous and should be carefully limited. Scholars enculturate and direct student collaborators. Enculturate them to research rigors and mechanics and direct them through successful project completion, via weekly meetings and rounds of feedback. In addition to directing research teams moving in unison, scholars push mentees to develop and pursue personal research ideas, knowing that scholars are more productive when they work on something that interests them. Mentors also help students form academic networks, by encouraging conference attendance and introducing them to influential scholars there and elsewhere, and teach students the hidden curriculum success advice found throughout this book. It is through effective mentoring that one’s legacy lives on.