7: Developing Supportive Mentoring Models for Graduate Education

I begin this chapter with two stories that represent many of the students with whom I work in graduate and doctoral programs. The first is Mary, who was accepted and enrolled in graduate school in an urban education doctoral program at a state university only ten miles from her home. In her mid-forties, she is a full time employee in a non-profit organization as well as a single mother of two children. Mary knew that becoming a student would be challenging, yet the doctoral degree would give her the credentials she needed to achieve her dream of becoming a faculty member at a university. As Mary began and progressed in her program of study, she struggled to keep up with her course work and attend to her career and family, yet she persevered in her academic work. However, the conflicting “pulls” of family, career, and academic work on her time and energies meant that she only came to campus when she had face‑to-face classes, and when on campus, she had little time to spend cultivating relationships with faculty members and students in her classes. When Mary was finally able to begin work on her dissertation, she chose as her dissertation chair a faculty member who had been her instructor in two doctoral classes and who seemed moderately interested in her dissertation topic. Mary planned on finishing her dissertation within a year of beginning the research and writing process, but without the structure of coursework to keep her motivated and the limited support from peers and faculty members, her dissertation developed very slowly. During this time, her dissertation chair left and took a job at a different university, and one other dissertation committee member retired, requiring Mary to find other faculty members willing to serve on her committee, even if she did not know them very well and they had only marginal interest in her research. Finally, 10 years after she began her program, Mary successfully defended her dissertation and graduated. She submitted an article written from her dissertation research to a regional peer reviewed journal, and after several revisions, her article was published. However, although she has sent out numerous curriculum vitas for assistant professor positions, 5 years after graduating with her PhD, Mary is still working at the same non-profit organization in which she was employed when she began her doctoral work. Mary rarely sees her peer students with whom she attended graduate school or the faculty members who were on her dissertation committee, and although her hard-earned credentials has helped her advance in her career into a senior management position, she has been unsuccessful in following her dream of becoming a tenure‑track faculty member at a college or university.