How is a graduate mentor like an elephant?

Douglas Kenrick Professor of Psychology

The question about graduate mentors and elephants isn't just a set up for a corny punch line. In fact, it's related to a serious question I recently asked my grad students. I asked them to connect an article on "life history strategy" (a theory developed mostly from work with nonhuman organisms) to their own research (which deals with social behavior in human beings). Life history theory begins with the premise that all animals, including humans, have limited resources, and need to make continual trade-offs. Developing a big healthy body means waiting to reproduce until a later age, making a lot of investment in one's offspring means producing fewer of them, and so on. One small mammal from Madagascar reaches sexual maturity five or six weeks after birth. Elephants, on the other hand, take a hundred times that long to mature, then carry each fetus for over a year, and nurse it for several years beyond that.

Graduate mentors also have a life history, and it has some similarities to an elephant's: we wait decades before we start investing in a small number of high quality intellectual offspring. Also like elephants, we do a better job as we grow older.

Different Phases, Differing Investments: A key assumption of life history theory is this: animals change their investment allocations over their lifespans. Consider raising a child - at first, doting parents nurse, spoon-feed, and change diapers for the helpless infant. Later the child gets a plate of food and a spoon, the diapers are gradually withdrawn, and parents tolerate some messy accidents in the interest of creating self-reliant toddlers. Still later parents ask teenagers to fix their own meals, and then encourage them to get a job and pay their own restaurant tabs. A good parent eventually needs to suppress the desire to keep babying their offspring, and to push them (however gently) out of the nest.

Like parenting, successful graduate mentoring requires different intellectual investments at different developmental phases. At first, students benefit from a lot of direct care and hand-holding. Our students arrive with mostly irrelevant skills - they're great at passive reading and answering multiple-choice questions, for example. It takes several years of intensive supervision for them to learn to think critically about established scientific ideas, and to develop their own original hypotheses at just the right level of detail to be testable. Then they need to become facile with different research techniques. When students finally master the basics of clear thinking, they face the most difficult steps - learning to communicate their ideas to journal editors, to grant panels, to curious undergraduates, and to journalists curious about the latest scientific findings (and each of these audiences wants them to speak in a different language).

Attracting Great Students: Graduate students, unlike biological relatives, are adopted into an existing family at a somewhat advanced age, and they fill out their own adoption applications. I have been extremely fortunate in having a great pool of applicants to choose from. For example, Yexin Jessica Li, who started working in my lab last year, graduated from Cornell and turned down offers from Ivy League schools and the University of Texas to come work with us. Other students in my lab have hailed from prestigious programs at places like UC Berkeley, Michigan, University of Virginia, and Duke University.

Over a decade ago, two Princeton professors informed me that our social psychology program was considered one of the top ten programs in the world. Since then, we have only gotten better. I am proud to say that my students have helped contribute to that success. To take three examples, Norm Li is now an assistant professor at the University of Texas, Mark Schaller is now a professor at the University of British Columbia, and Stephanie Brown is now at the University of Michigan medical school. Each is a regular contributor to top journals and each has received awards for his and her research and teaching. Other former students who've worked and published with me are now professors at UC Santa Barbara, Florida State, Indiana State, SUNY, University of Colorado, Ithaca College, University of Delaware, University of Utah, University of Houston, and the University of Groningen.

How do you run a successful program? A key feature of our program is that the faculty love to conduct research, and we get students fully involved in that research from the start (sometimes even before they arrive - my new colleague Adam Cohen and I invited Yexin Li to co-author a short paper in Behavioral & Brain Sciences with us even before she even set foot in Tempe). Vlad Griskevicius won three years of funding from NSF for a proposal I helped him write. Vlad is now leaving for a great position at the University of Minnesota after publishing several papers in prestigious journals. I told my wife that Vlad is likely to be the most successful student we ever trained, and she accused me of saying that about a different student every few years. She was right, but I say it because it's true -- our program keeps attracting and training better and better students.

Fostering Family Networks: Elephant calves do well not only because they have a doting mother; they are also protected and nurtured by an interconnected network of close relatives. Like an elephant herd, our program emphasizes mutual support at every level. All the papers coming out of my lab feature a team of authors, usually with a graduate student in lead author position. At our weekly meetings, beginning students see interesting ideas and exciting new research methods tossed around by a successful team of researchers, and they themselves are soon fully involved in that process.

I also encourage each of my graduate students to develop his or her own team of undergraduate assistants. By leading a team of highly motivated younger students, the graduate student picks up invaluable experience teaching and managing a lab, and can't help but collect more data along the way. When I looked over my own vita in preparation for writing this statement, I was amazed at how well these multi-level collaborations have paid off. I counted over 90 papers with graduate students as coauthors (55 different students, in fact).

Asking The Right Questions: In order to attract great students and get them excited about doing research, it helps immensely to tackle intellectually engaging topics. Besides having a lot of cool equipment and research methods (such as eye-trackers to measure exactly which face in a crowd attracts attention), my students work with me on questions that are socially relevant - asking how simple cognitive processes contribute to racial prejudice, social anxiety, or mate choice, for example. And our work reflects on theoretically profound issues (integrating ideas from evolutionary biology, cognitive science, and dynamical systems theory). My simple advice about their choice of research topics is: Don't study it if it you aren't fascinated by it.

Learning How to Talk to Strangers: The toughest part of training successful young academics is teaching them to write. I am inclined to take each one by the hand for the first part of the journey. For their early papers, I ask them to write just a few pages at a time, and I correct every sentence, offering plenty of advice about how to communicate more effectively in this or that specific way. Later on, I try to subtly shape advanced students not to need me any more. For the first step towards independence, I correct only the first third of a paper, then say "you get the idea, continue making these kinds of corrections yourself for the rest of the paper." Still later, I suppress all my rewriting inclinations, and just give them the kind of global feedback a reviewer would give- pointing out logical gaps or disjunctions between their data and what they want to say about it. Usually, by that time, they've begun to submit articles to journals, and are getting reviewer feedback directly. When those first outside reviews arrive, I walk them through revisions step-by-step. On later papers, I back off and let them handle more and more themselves. Then I get to watch their writing abilities continuing blooming on their own.

Besides becoming excellent researchers, my students have done extremely well as teachers. I myself love lecturing, and spend long hours perfecting colorful and engaging PowerPoints, developing attention-grabbing class demonstrations, and thinking up new ways to make complex ideas simple. Although I don't lecture to my graduate students in seminars, I do go to great lengths to teach my students how to lecture. I explain how communicating scientific ideas to students hones many of the same skills they'll need to communicate to their scientific peers. My recent students have pleased me by going well beyond my own accomplishments in this arena. Jill Sundie, Norm Li, and Jon Maner, have all recently won teaching awards from their own institutions. And all of three of them, as well as my more recent students Vlad Griskevicius and Josh Ackerman, have won awards for their presentations at international conferences.

From Diapering to Grandarenting. Returning to the life history metaphor, mentors need to invest different resources at different stages. What we contribute changes during the helpless infant phase, the messy toddler phase, and the adolescent rebellious period. If all goes well, we get to watch mature young adults pack their bags and head off to give birth to intellectual progeny of their own. They don't always remember to write home as frequently as we'd like, but every time I see an article in a top journal written by one of my former students with one of their own advisees, I get to feel grandparental pride. Whether that's an emotion humans share with elephants, I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised.