Doctrine Man is My Mentor

One of my new favorite twitter-er's is Doctrine Man.  He writes a daily cartoon of military stuff, chock full of snark:


Anyhow, he also has a blog, with today's theme on mentoring.

He, of course, criticizes the army's perhaps too generalized and too systematic take on mentoring since it is not mathematical or formulaic.  Still, at least the army thinks about mentoring and tries to get its folks to think about mentoring.  In my business of academia, there is great variance in the quality of mentoring (aka supervision).  We mentor undergrads, grad students and even junior faculty.  We are mentored by senior faculty sometimes.  But there is very little training, with some schools offering various workshops that might or might not be well-attended.  I have no clue since I am usually too busy mentoring to attend such stuff.

Doctrine Man's facts about mentoring:

• Fact No. 1: Mentoring relationships take time to develop.
• Fact No. 2: Not everyone is suited to be a mentor.
• Fact No. 3: Not everyone is a good candidate for mentoring.
• Fact No. 4: Mentoring defies checklists, charts, and formulas.
• Fact No. 5: Mentoring can’t be forced.

Ah, but there is the rub or several rubs.  Fact no. 2 is hard for the academic world, since all tenured folk at research universities are expected to supervise grad students.  We are all busy folks and some people either through intention or inattention become known as crappy advisers, which then makes the good advisers far busier.  That can then cause their supervision to suffer.  It is funny how the folks who supervise badly always seem to want to increase intake of new students.  

Anyhow, good supervision can become a bit of a curse and bad supervision can be rewarding in the sense that you get less work to do.  On the other hand, good mentoring can be very, very rewarding as the success of one's mentorees becomes one's own success.  I have had a few email exchanges this week with current and former students, leading to much satisfaction.  I do consider agreeing to supervise someone as an unbreakable vow, more or less--it becomes a binding magical contract. I am looking forward to the next International Studies Association meeting for the first gathering of "Team Steve"--my students who are now dispersed throughout North America.  Dinner will be on me.  I just hope they don't drink too much (but if they do, it is probably my fault).

I have not been a perfect mentor, and I have complained alot about how much work it is.  But in this business where metrics of success are hard to measure or can be very deceptive (citations may just mean that people hate your work), employed, productive former students are very much a source of pride.  My mentoring here has been my greatest contribution to McGill.  The funny thing is that I am already supervising a dissertation at Carleton, so the mentoring is not going to be stopping anytime soon.


I just wish I had some army training in the art of mentoring.  Or perhaps not. ;)