Giving them wings to fly: Advice for soon-to-be, new, and established faculty in the training of graduate students
Training Committee & Symposium Overview
The SPSP Training Committee is sponsoring a symposium focused on providing guidance on the mentoring of graduate students. As we anticipate, start, and continue along our careers, we're confronted with numerous challenges surrounding the mentoring of graduate students. These are important issues given our students represent the future of the field, yet we're often only exposed to the strategies of our own mentors or those in the departments from which we get our degrees; rarely is the practice of mentoring featured in our own training. The Training Committee is excited to present four distinguished mentors in areas pertaining to both personality and social psychology who will offer for consideration their views on such key aspects of graduate mentoring as: How does one nurture the scholarly growth and possibilities for career success among one's students? How does one establish a constructive relationship in which critical feedback can be delivered and used as a springboard for development? How and when should training be tailored to the specific strengths and weaknesses of the individual? The symposium is intended to educate and inform not only soon-to-be and new faculty, but also those who seek ways to improve in the vital task of graduate mentoring. The symposium is structured to provide ample opportunity for audience questions.
Speakers| David Funder University of California, Riverside The Seven Secrets of Training Highly Successful Graduate Students |
Seven tips to success in training psychology graduate students so they can begin their career on the right track. You can train your students to: (1) Go to meetings and network every way they can. Treat SPSP as a business trip and never miss a chance to join a colloquium speaker for lunch or dinner. Don’t forget that their fellow graduate students at other universities will be their life-long colleagues. (2) Avoid “working at home.” It is surprising how much one can get done sitting in an office with nothing to do but work. Plus, people in their department will learn who they are. (3) Find ways to delegate research tasks to others (such as undergraduate assistants). Good working relationship between graduate and undergraduate students can and should be mutually beneficial. (4) Collaborate with fellow students as well as with faculty. A major research project cannot be a one-person production. (5) Talk with their advisor – a lot. Regular lab meetings can be particularly valuable, but whatever the format, constant contact is a must. (6) Don’t get bogged down with what doesn’t matter – being busy is not the same thing as being productive. Being a good TA and departmental citizen are worthy activities, and will be praised – don’t forget this is not why they went to graduate school, and will be very little help in getting a job. (7) Do research all the time – from the first day on campus to the last, and beyond. And consider the many careers besides academia where their research skills may be valuable. |
| Thomas D. Gilovich Cornell University The Critical Role of Trust in Graduate Student Mentoring |
Conflict mediators are taught over and over to “trust the process”—to let the mediation unfold rather than quickly encourage a solution that comes more from the mind of the mediator than the disputants. The same can be said of graduate student mentoring. All students are different and each must find and develop his or her own strengths to maximize long-term success. Rather than impose on each student a one-size-fits-all template of what makes a good scientist, it is important to develop and trust a set of training experiences (that is, a sound curriculum) and trust that those experiences, and the independent bent of mind that comes with working through them, will lead to the outcome that both parties seek. This talk will discuss this and various other places in which trust is critical to successful graduate student mentoring. |
| Jennifer Crocker University of Michigan Giving Constructive Feedback |
Giving positive feedback to graduate student advisees—or anyone for that matter—is easy, because people like to hear good news. Giving negative feedback, on the other hand, is hard, because it can be upsetting to the recipient, to the relationship, and consequently to the provider of feedback. It is tempting to become a “booster,” praising accomplishments and overlooking issues and difficulties until they accumulate or become too severe to overlook. But being a booster does not serve the needs of graduate students to learn and evolve as psychologists, nor does it serve the needs of the advisor or the program. Boosters can create a “love, love, love, hate” dynamic when problems are neglected for too long. The challenge for both positive and negative feedback is to make it constructive, so it supports, inspires, and leads to growth. I will describe a collaborative process for giving both positive and negative feedback that involves identifying the student’s most important strengths and weaknesses (i.e., those that will have the greatest impact on the students’ professional success, as defined by the student), and provides a structure for the student to evolve, holding both student and advisor accountable. |
| Jeff Greenberg University of Arizona Mentoring Grad Students: No Size Fits All |
There are some general principles to good mentoring and fostering growth toward a successful career in social and personality psychology, and I will briefly suggest some of those (e.g., First Do No Harm). But a key one I will focus on is Flexibility. Because each grad student has different strengths and weaknesses and a different personality, mentoring should always be customized to the needs, skills, personality, and goals of the individual. Patience is an important aspect of this flexibility, because different students develop various competencies at different rates. I will provide specific examples to illustrate ways mentoring can be customized to the individual student, depending on variables such as work ethic, self-confidence, sociability, and idealism. |