Meet Your Match: How Mentorship Can Make (or Break) Your Master’s

Can you share how your academic and career experiences have shaped your approach to mentorship?

Mentorship is one of the last parts of the institution that is not institutionalized. Most students benefit from mentorship of some sort, but there is no formal process for either assigning mentors or assessing mentorship. It retains some of the medieval origins of the university, functioning more like an apprenticeship than regular enrollment. Because it is so particular to the people involved, mentorship is a two-sided match — the student and the mentor each have to think the connection is a good idea for it to work.

Back when I was a student in the 1980s, the process was so opaque that we didn’t even talk about it, and when I first heard mentorship discussed formally, I thought “Well, I guess I didn’t really have a mentor when I was in school.” Then I remembered that my first job out of college was working for one of my professors, and I was like, “Ooh.” And of course, when something is implicit like that, some students will understand how to take advantage of it, and others won’t — it’s part of what Tony Jack at BU writes about in trying to describe the ways disadvantaged students can lack the necessary but tacit understanding of the hidden curriculum, the deep but unspoken norms of the systems they are operating in.

I wish departments were more transparent about the opportunities for those sorts of relationships, without trying to play matchmaker between students and faculty. This is something still best negotiated individually rather than departmentally.

How has the mentor-mentee relationship evolved with the shift to digital learning?

A mentor needs to care about a mentee as a student, as a future creator of good work, and as a person. There is rarely a moment where a student formally becomes a mentee. Instead, there’s a spectrum of engagement that scales from “you’re enrolled in my class, so I care about your work” to “you’re one of my people, and I care about your future.” The digital shift has the biggest effect on faculty’s sense of students as people. We know from social media that people can and do forge important relationships online every day. We also know that it takes a bit more deliberate effort, and that there is more room for missed signals or misunderstandings. In the context of digital learning, it’s worth being a bit more engaged.

Faculty can and should provide more opportunities for students to engage with each other and with the professor outside the class, even if that just means opening up Zoom 10 minutes before class and chatting with whomever shows up, or asking students to come to office hours. And students can be more direct about asking for advice. When you turn in an assignment, instead of just hoping for a good grade, you can ask for specific feedback — “I’m especially interested in this particular idea in my paper; can you suggest other things I should read?” or, “I enjoyed writing this, and I wonder if I could come talk with you about it after I get your comments back?”

How important is it for a mentor to have a robust network in their industry or academia?

It’s important if it’s important to the student. I’ve worked with students who have wanted to go into parts of the academy or industry I know well, and I’ve had students who mostly needed advice about their working methods or goals in fields I didn’t know as well. And different people can provide different things — there’s no guarantee that there is someone out there who will both tell you what you need to hear about project scope and approaches and have contacts the student should talk to.

For faculty, it’s important that we be clear about this with the students — to any given issue that requires interaction with someone more senior, the faculty member can say, “I can help,” “I know who can help,” or “I don’t know who can help.” Many of the negative stories around these kinds of relationships come from faculty suggesting that they can play a certain role and then failing at it, either because they were a bad fit, or because they weren’t actually engaged with the student. This is one of the situations around mentorship where clarity is the best policy.

When it comes to finding a mentor, what are some red flags that might signal to a student that a potential mentor might not be the best fit?

I mean, same red flags as in-person. There are some behaviors that shade into abuse, but even outside those obvious “get out” behaviors, faculty who rely on students for work or support outside of academic effort (picking up dry cleaning is a famous red flag offline; I suppose the online version would be being asked to do things like booking travel).

There are subtler issues in the context of academic work. There is some apprenticeship value in helping a faculty member prepare for a talk (summarizing papers, producing slides), but if it is always about the faculty’s work but unrelated to what the student is working on, or if it is consulting work for which the faculty member is being paid but the student is not, that can be worrying.

And the one thing that is different about online is that there is much less casual contact, much less running into one another in the halls. Some stories of failed mentorship involve a student thinking the faculty member is going to support them — sometimes because the faculty member said so, sometimes because the student wrongly inferred it, often in between — and then gets let down. Because online has much less casual interaction, it’s harder to tell if a delay in responding to a request for help is because the putative mentor is interested but swamped, or if it’s because they are not really interested.

When COVID hit, I was working with a grad student on her thesis without her being in a class of mine, and we just scheduled regular check-ins, which kept both the work and the conversation between us on track. Online, you have to be a little bit more structured like that to make up for the decline in serendipity.

What strategies would you suggest for maintaining a positive and mutually beneficial relationship with an online (or any) mentor throughout a master's program?

Be interested, and be interesting. If you are talking to a faculty member whose work or insights interest you, say so, and if you are working on something you think they would have a good perspective on, say that as well. This goes back to mentorship being a more organic relationship than enrollment — it’s not like you have conversations with all of your professors, but just one of them will hand you a special badge that says “Mentee.”

If you engage with your professors, maybe one of them will become disproportionately important to your career. Maybe several of them will offer different things you need. Maybe you will get more out of your coursework. Any of those things could happen if you treat classes as an invitation to learn more than what’s on the syllabus. Most of them won’t if you don’t.

How do you incorporate the principles of good mentorship into your role as vice provost, particularly in designing and developing online education offerings?

Where online learning is weak, it is often because it gets stripped of the more exploratory, playful, or random aspects of human encounters. NYU is a research university with deep habits of deferring to faculty in how they run their classes, but when we provide technological tools, we also try to provide guides and workshops with multiple modes of delivery — like Zoom rooms with shared Google docs so people can see each other’s work as it is developing; use of online brainstorming, whiteboarding, or note-posting tools; using video to bring in guests from around the world; and so on.

When you look at TikTok, YouTube, or even Instagram, there are people creating instructional content for all kinds of things. When faculty are more open to teaching in engaging ways, it can make it easier for the students to engage in other ways as well.

With your extensive study of the internet and its impact, combined with your role in shaping the academic aspects of technology-based teaching and learning at a university level, how do you envision the future of mentorship in online education?

Learning can be a solo act, but education is necessarily social. It involves not just knowledge transfer but identity formation, and it happens in an institutional context. Now that nearly every college and university in the U.S. can deliver at least some online courses, I’d love to see greater concern for interactions that are not just about utilitarian delivery of lectures, assignments, assessments, and so on. If we allow more of the student-to-student and student-to-faculty conversation to flourish online, improvements in mentorship will follow.