welcome back to season three of the podcast!! this season, i'm demystifying all the stuff that makes grad school hard that you might not know about, and this week, we're talking about mentorship!
i don't know about you, but i got a lot of advice and gave a lot of thought when it came to building my dissertation committee, but no one really ever talked about building a mentorship network beyond that. so, if that's you too - this week's episode will tell you all about why you need a team, how to evaluate what you already have in terms of mentorship, and how to build strength in the areas you need.
use this free worksheet (download the PDF here) and the reflection questions i share to get started!
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What if there was a way to take some of the pressure off your dissertation chair and get more comprehensive, supportive mentorship all at the same time. Let's talk about it in this week's episode of
📍 Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar.
And in season three, I'm demystifying some of the most important, but often invisible parts of grad school that learning about might just make your life a little bit easier. And make sure you check out the link in the show notes for my working more intentionally tool kit. Which is available for you totally for free. Now let's get into it
No one really explained to me how to find mentors in grad school. People gave me a lot of advice, however, on how to pick a chair for my dissertation committee. And I imagine there's a lot of advice around, selecting a PI or a lab to join. In a perfect world. The head of your PhD project would be also be the Keystone of your mentoring as a graduate student. But even if you have the most educated open-minded available, supportive person in the world, I would still give you the same piece of advice.
Get yourself, a team of mentors. No matter what you're after degree career plans are no matter what your personal life looks like. And no matter what your subject is, a team of mentors is a wise move professionally and personally. Reason number one is that team mentoring can take some of the pressure off of you.
We are all complex beings. With lives that stretch way beyond the PhD. Having a team of people that you look to for advice, mentorship and support can make it seem a lot less overwhelming when you need to confide difficult information or seek support about a sensitive topic. Before I consciously started to create a team of mentors. I often hesitated or even straight up refrained from confiding in anyone about sensitive issues like my health or my future plans, because they didn't want it to impact my standing in the program. My access to funds or even my reputation as a grad student. But after I started to build a team of people,
I had so many choices from all sorts of areas in my life on campus and off who could offer advice without being directly responsible for my degree process at the same time.
Reason number two is that team mentoring can take some of the pressure off your mentors, too. At some point, I realized that it was completely bananas, that I was expecting tenured faculty members at an R one university to give me solid advice and mentoring about how to best translate the skills that I was getting during the PhD into a job outside of academia.
I'm not saying that to excuse faculty ignorance or to excuse refusal, to engage with the realities of the job market, but to acknowledge that there were many, many people right on my campus, even that could give me much more sound advice on different kinds of careers, because they had them. I had similar issues when I had questions coming up around how to have a family in academia or how to manage a job search in a geographically confined area.
My mentoring needs had extended beyond the work that one mentor could do. And I needed to adjust my strategy.
By not expecting any one person. To give me sound researched, supportive advice in every area of my life, personal and professional. I freed all of the parties from having that burden. I shifted from asking all of my questions to one person, to asking specific tailored questions, to specific people. And that gave me richer conversations and widen my network at the same time.
All right. You might be thinking I'm on board. How do I find this team, Katie? And the first thing I would say is that you need to evaluate your mentoring needs. This is the critical step that I see. So many people skip. Many people can see the benefits of expanding their mentoring network beyond their chair, but not that many people know how to secure a diverse range of voices to support them.
And I would argue that stepping back and assessing what one's mentoring needs are first can lead to a more . Targeted and efficient networking, building phase all around. I created a chart and you can get it free in the show notes to help you brainstorm what areas you're already receiving mentoring in and where you can improve.
Of course, these categories might shift depending on your PhD and its parameters, but for most people, this is a good starting point. That worksheet outlines five different mentoring zones. And in the next section of this episode, I'm going to give you some questions to help you evaluate what kind of mentoring or support you already have in this area and what kind you might want to look for moving forward.
Get your pencils out because here those questions come.
Area one. Discipline or your field or your subject?
For many, this is the area that's the most easily addressed in a role that's probably filled by your dissertation advisor, at least partially, but some questions to ask yourself. Do I have support to keep abreast of all of the latest developments in my field. Are there places I can go to make sure that my work is part of conversations that are important in my discipline.
Am, I well connected to mechanisms for distributing my work in my field. Whether that's applying for journals, conferences, Twitter conversations. What have you.
And last but not least if my dissertation advisors research does not completely overlap with mine. Am I looking for other spaces and conversations where I might be more of a direct fit?
Zone two is teaching. Although teaching is not part of all PhD programs, many jobs in academia, involved teaching in some capacity. But as many of us know many jobs in academic or even non-academic spaces require teaching as part of the role. University's normally are well-equipped to support your teaching growth. If you know where to look.
So here's some questions. Am I getting feedback on my teaching regularly. Either from faculty members, staff, from teaching centers, student teaching mentors, or even fellow graduate students. All of those different kinds of people can give you feedback or help you to interpret the feedback that your students are giving you.
Am I learning and growing as a teacher. Am I staying involved in current pedagogy developments or experimenting with new technologies. And am I seeking out opportunities to teach, even if my funding doesn't include a regular teaching assignment. Many students report that giving guest lectures or volunteering for limited teaching engagements like workshops or greater positions can give them really valuable experience for their CV.
Zone three is skills. Grad school gives you a concentrated opportunity to develop many skills, but your advisor might not have the time or capability to support your growth in a complete way. So. Are you improving your skills as a writer? Are you taking advantage of on-campus writing support, like writing centers or writing groups?
Are you involved in any writing groups? Are you seeking feedback on your writing from a wide range of audiences? Are you improving as a reader? Are you reading widely in your field? Are you organizing the information that you're ingesting as part of your reading? Are you improving your networking skills?
Are you practicing informational interview skills? Are you cultivating an online presence? And are you improving any of your discipline specific skills? Like lab skills, teaching skills, media skills. It's going to be specific for you.
Zone four is career planning.
For many reasons your academic advisor might not be the best person. To help you plan out a diverse range of career options and the skills and steps that you'll need to follow in order to make those possibilities happen. But there are a growing number of places in spaces that might help you do that.
So are you being open-minded about the types of positions that you'll be seeking? Are you taking time to meet people from your discipline or your field who hold a wide range of positions? Are you consciously building a CV to support whatever your career aspirations are. Are you building a resume or at least thinking about a resume that might translate to employers that are outside of academia.
Have you sat down and evaluated. What kinds of activities you actually enjoy doing during the PhD? And what that might mean for your job search. Have you done the same introspective work about your values, your ethics, and what kind of life you envision the role of your job playing for the rest of it?
And the last zone is your personal life. So being vulnerable, isn't easy. Especially in a high pressure academic environment. Building a team of mentors where you have places to go to be your authentic self is so valuable. So, do you have people that you can confide in when you're not feeling your best mentally, physically, or otherwise?
Do you have people that will help connect you to resources that will help you be well and healthy. Without having to worry about what asking for help may mean.
Are you building a network of people whose values align with yours and can those people respect your values and how you're choosing to live them out?
Do you have people who will be able to listen, respect and talk through personal issues in a confidential and sensitive way.
So when it comes to building the team, Take this wheel and place people where you think they might best support you, or maybe you're already supporting you. Do you have any empty spaces on that sheet? Hopefully the answers to the questions in each of these sections will help guide you as you determine where your network is already strong and where you can build it up.
And when you've identified an area that you can build your network, these questions can help you narrow down the specific kind of support and mentoring that you're looking for.
And then you have the beginnings of a script that you can use to approach them, asking for their help.
Keep in mind that specific limited requests are always going to be more successful when you're building a new relationship. For example. Emailing a professor who's teaching you admire to see if they'll review a syllabus that you're pitching for next fall. Bonus points. If you can guide that feedback even more specifically by asking questions or limiting their feedback to structure or content.
That request is going to be much more likely to get garner a positive response than an email that's asking for more vague mentoring on teaching. Mentoring is built on building relationships, but beginning that specific relationship with a request can feel more genuine and less forced. The important thing here to remember is that not every mentor, it needs to be perfectly aligned with you in every area of the mentoring wheel.
Some people might give you outstanding mentorship and the aspects of your discipline that are confusing. And clique-ish. While also giving you terrible advice about the job market or teaching or balancing all of this with your personal life. Having clear expectations, both for each person in your mentoring team and for yourself as the designer, builder and maintainer of that team.
Can make some of these abstract relationships feel so much more concrete and useful.
And you deserve to have relationships that feel supportive for all of you. And that just might be more possible if you have a team rather than just one singular mentor. Thank you so much for joining me and I will see you next week.
📍 Thank you for listening to Grad School is Hard, but... You can find more information and resources in the show notes and at thrive-phd.com. Every month, I'll select one reviewer for a free 45 minute session with me. So please subscribe, rate, and review to help spread the word about the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!