Although our call for submissions for this issue of In Progress did not specify a theme, one has nonetheless emerged in this second issue. The two scholarly articles, interview, and advice column featured here all touch on the theme of mentoring in some way.

First, Dr. William Gannon, Assistant Professor in Biology and Special Assistant to the Vice President for Research at the University of New Mexico, explains the importance of mentoring for graduate students engaged in research, and offers advice on both finding and acting as a mentor. The resources and suggestions he provides are useful to graduate students at any stage of the degree program.

Next, in “Developing Professionally through Graduate Student Publications,” William Christopher Brown of the University of Minnesota, Crookston, characterizes graduate student publications as opportunities for graduate students  “to grow professionally and reflect critically on their intellectual and professional growth.” In describing his own experience publishing in graduate student journals, Brown makes a strong case for the value of peer mentoring between graduate students from different institutions. “Graduate student journals,” he argues, “give burgeoning scholars a venue to see their ideas anew through the eyes of peers who have had different graduate study experiences.”

In “Swashbuckling, Poaching, and Marauding: Why We Should Be Pirates of Text,” Laura Lisabeth of St. John’s University discusses mentoring and the process of paying it forward. She begins her article with a description of an “Introduction to the Profession” course that she took with her own mentor, Steven Mentz, which made the graduate students enrolled feel “exactly how we want to feel: so surrounded by ideas, texts, and language that our intellectual condition blurs into the physical.” Proceeding from a description of her own reaction to literary texts used in this graduate seminar, Lisabeth moves seamlessly into an explanation of how she uses literary texts in mentoring her students in order to help them think about their own relationships to the many discourses that surround them, as well as how to interact creatively with those texts as writers.

Finally, Cristyn Elder, Megan Schoen, Brian Hendrickson, and Laurie Pinkert emphasize the important role that faculty mentors played in the development of the Writing Program Administrators Graduate Student Organization, which creates opportunities for formal and informal peer mentoring among graduate student writing program administrators nationwide. They also advise graduate students across disciplines who might be interested in forming similar organizations to start by consulting with faculty mentors, who can provide relevant information about institutional structures to which graduate students may not otherwise have access.

While these articles provide plenty of insight into the role of mentoring in graduate students’ careers, we cannot help but notice that a concern raised by Wilkins et al. in the 2011 issue remains unaddressed here. The authors of “Navigating the Academy: Experiences of Female Students of Color in the Social Sciences” argue that mentoring relationships are especially important for graduate students of color as they negotiate challenging social situations both inside and outside academia. Despite this, they explain that, “students of color have often cited a lack of mentoring relationships (Davidson and Foster-Johnson 550).  The conditions that result in this low degree of mentoring support are often intersected with difficulty in finding a mentor of similar backgrounds and having few opportunities to work or learn from professors of color.” We hope that this question will be taken back up in future articles, or on our new blog.

Thanks are due to all of the authors, reviewers, publicists, and supporters who made this issue possible. We look forward to your input on the blog and in future submissions.

Co-Editors

Lindsey Ives, ABD & Leah Sneider, PhD