A lot of whatever success I’ve been lucky enough to have is because of mentorship I received along the way, especially from my brilliant dissertation chair Adriana de Souza e Silva, but also from lots of other people, including Steve Wiley, Jason Swarts, Jason Farman, Scott Campbell, Rowan Wilken, Rich Ling, Carolyn Miller and way too many people for me to name here. Consequently, I have taken mentorship very seriously in my career in the hope that the people I work with can be lucky enough to have some of the opportunities I’ve been privileged enough to have.

My academic mentorship focuses on reciprocity and treating students like future colleagues. I chaired two dissertations (one on VR and environmental rhetoric and one on using social media in composition classrooms) that were defended last year, and I’ve remained close with both those individuals as they’ve begun their academic careers. I’m also on four other dissertation committees, and I’m chairing a Master’s thesis right now about the HBO show Station Eleven and trauma. Additionally, long before I moved to a department with a PhD program, I both published with and mentored doctoral students who reached out to me. As an example, I served as a mentor for ICA’s doctoral consortium for three years, and was then the co-organizer of the doctoral consortium for the past three years (though…COVID). I’ve also made conscious efforts to publish with grad students and early-career scholars so they can gain the same experiences I was lucky enough to have, and I’ve published at least five articles with graduate students and am working on more. I’m a big believer that one of the best ways to mentor someone is to help them navigate the often invisible hurdles one can only recognize through hands-on experience.

But of course mentoring extends well past doctoral students. At my former job, we didn’t have a doctoral program, and I led the internship program for Master’s students for three years that helped prepare them for when they graduated. That was a fantastic experience, and I learned just as much from students about the changing face of professional writing as they learned from me. And then when I came to Clemson, I ended up chairing multiple Master’s committees and being a member on a few more. I’m just as happy mentoring students going into academia or industry, and I believe healthy, productive mentorship is crucially important regardless.

In sum, I think mentorship is one of the most important, rewarding parts of our job. I’m a huge believer in the importance of supportive feedback, and I always try to make extensive comments and then meet individually with people I mentor to walk them through those comments. There’s genuinely no part of my job I love more than watching someone revise a piece of writing into something great. And finally, I was lucky enough to have mentors who walked me through applying to industry jobs and, most applicably for my current job, helped me navigate all the hidden stuff in academia, and I benefitted so greatly from that experience. I now try to pass that down through my mentorship whenever I can.

Oh, and as a very final note (I promise), but if I had it my way, we’d value letters of recommendation from former students just as much (if not more) than we do of colleagues. The first two doctoral students I directed–Kailan Sindelar and Jacob Richter–could speak more to me as a mentor, but just as importantly…a colleague, as anyone else could. Some day I hope we do move in that direction of reaching out to former students (if they’re willing) as a way to address the too prevalent practices of toxic mentorship that never become public even as people move from job to job.