Tenured Radical’s latest post states:
The other day I read a comment on Facebook to the effect that, after changing jobs, many academics experience a moment of intense regret. The author of the comment timed this moment of regret at about six months into the new job, when the losses and the difficulty of the transition becomes truly apparent.
Like her, I am not experiencing regret, but it have been noticing certain differences as I get settled in. In some cases, such as mentoring, these differences have given me an even greater appreciation for my former colleagues.
It is not that my new colleagues are particularly bad at mentoring, but one particular colleague at my former institution regularly went out of her way to ensure that I knew what was going on. Unlike mentoring undergraduates or graduate students, at the faculty level I think that successful mentoring is mostly about keeping new colleagues in your thoughts so that you can tell them when you have to do something that a new faculty member might not know about. An example of this is submitting final grades. When the end of the semester nears, a good faculty mentor will not only think, “I need to submit my final grades,” but also, “John might not know how grade submission works here, so I should stop by his office and show him.”
As faculty members it is easy to get caught up in our own grading, students, and deadlines. I think that successful mentoring of other faculty members requires an external focus that our daily work does not. Hopefully I will remember this if I ever get the chance to mentor a new faculty member myself.
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Memoirs of a SLACer 