Keith W. Kintigh,
Professor of Anthropology

Mentoring, per se, is not something to which I devote a great deal of conscious attention; instead, mentoring is thoroughly embedded in a wide range of interactions with graduate students - our future colleagues. Establishment of a mentoring relationship is a matter of mutual agreement between a student and a faculty member. I see myself as having rigorous expectations of students, and I believe that is also the perception of our graduate students. Thus, students who choose to work with me understand that there is an expectation of excellence and hard work. However, the successes of former students provide an important motivation to maintain the positive cycle of hard work leading to success.

Of course, mentoring occurs in the classroom and in discussions during office hours, but as importantly, it occurs over the phone or email, in more informal settings on and off campus, and especially during the extended, intensive field projects needed for the kind of archaeological research that I do. While much important mentoring is focused on an individual, it also occurs with groups of students who interact and support one another. While I have never before had the occasion to articulate my philosophy of mentoring, I believe it can reasonably be summarized under four topics: professionalization, research skills and opportunities, professional support, and personal motivation and confidence.

Professionalization
By professionalization I mean the process of socializing students into a profession, in my case, archaeology. Students need to know how key disciplinary activities work, and I find that they are anxious to learn such things as how grants are reviewed, how the publication process operates, what happens in job interviews, how one negotiates once a job offer is tendered, and how the tenure process works. In all these contexts, I try to convey a key skill — to view the situation not from one's own perspective but from that of the decision-makers. While important discussions of professional issues take place in class, they frequently come up in discussions in my lab or office, in the field, or other informal settings. Students on the job market typically have more detailed questions that I deal with individually.

Socializing students to absorb professional and disciplinary responsibilities and ethical standards demands some explicit treatment, but must in large part be accomplished by example. As scientists, I feel that we have a responsibility to provide information to the general public that has supported our research. Furthermore, archaeologists have special obligations to work with Indian tribes related to the prehistoric people we study. I intend that students see that my own efforts in this direction are professionally important and personally rewarding. My field projects, conducted with graduate students, have frequently involved public open houses and have sometimes resulted in permanent or temporary exhibits. In both research and service activities, I try to work with tribes concerned with our research. We developed an exhibit at Lyman Lake State Park through a formal collaboration with the Hopi Tribe, using grant funding I was able to obtain. In another case, I was a consultant to the Pueblo of Zuni on an exhibit that is currently on display at their tribal museum. I played a significant role in the long-sought acquisition by the Pueblo of Zuni of a large ancestral pueblo that had been subject to serious looting. In this, I was assisted by a number of graduate students who volunteered a weekend to map the ruin. This was a necessary step in the Archaeological Conservancy's purchase of the site. The Conservancy subsequently stabilized the site, enhanced its protection, and turned it over to the Zuni tribe.

Research Skills and Opportunities
One cannot succeed as a professional without key research skills. Both my students and I are blessed with a superb set of faculty colleagues. As a faculty, I think we do an effective job of teaching those skills in class. However, it is absolutely essential for students to refine those skills by working through research problems with mentors - in dissertations, theses, and research papers. Because faculty members have different strengths, the overall quality of a student's mentoring depends not only on a single student-mentor relationship, but on relationships with a set of professors that have high expectations and provide consistent messages from varied viewpoints, informed by different expertise.

One must both execute research well and be able to communicate it clearly. Thus, I spend considerable effort in working with students on both analytical issues and on logical presentation and clear writing. I critique nearly all writing assignments as if they were submitted for publication. While students are often frustrated by having to go through multiple drafts, the grimaces evaporate with the award of an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant (as has happened to eight students whose committees I have chaired), or with the acceptance of a publication. One of my key messages is that good writing doesn't just happen for anyone (including me). It is time-consuming, hard work; it gets easier, but is never effortless.

A research skill of overwhelming importance is the selection and development of research topics. I never assign research topics for dissertations, theses or important research papers. However, if prompted, I will lay out a variety of general topics to start a conversation. Most importantly, I attempt to be a responsive sounding board for students' research ideas, helping them to transform their own interests into a tractable topic. In this, I attempt to follow the model of my doctoral advisor and most influential graduate mentor, Henry T. Wright. Having entered his office with some less than half-baked idea, I vividly remember exiting with a clear direction toward some useful research, having been encouraged that I really did have an interesting idea, but nonetheless with a realization that there was a great deal of value added by my advisor. I am successful to the extent that I can help advance students' research while preserving their "ownership" of the resulting ideas. I believe that this feeling of ownership fosters the independent thinking that is essential to excellence in scholarship.

I try to direct student research so that when the Ph.D. is complete, the student is well positioned to get a job and to pursue continued research. To do this, I try to identify vacant or underpopulated research niches where students can establish a national prominence before completing their degrees. Further, by pressing students to write their term papers as articles and their dissertations as book manuscripts, students bound for academia complete their graduate careers already well down the road to tenure. The dissertations of four of my doctoral advisees have won the Society for American Archaeology's annual Dissertation Award. The first three of these students have had their dissertations published as books by the University of Arizona Press and the fourth (whose committee I co-chaired with Michelle Hegmon) is in negotiation with the same press.

I have had highly successful students who worked closely with me on data that I had a primary role in collecting, and equally successful students who worked on data completely independent of my own research. (While my own work focuses on the U.S. Southwest, a recent Ph.D. specialized in the Northwest Coast). I see it as an important mentoring responsibility to provide a range of research opportunities associated with my own research, especially in archaeological field work. These opportunities begin with the chance, as graduates or undergraduates, to enroll in ASU's summer archaeological field school that I direct on a rotating basis. (Incidentally, field projects have proved to be wonderful venues for recruiting talented graduate students). At the next level, graduate assistants help organize the field schools and supervise student crews. More senior students have become co-directors of my last two major field projects, acting as full partners in the design and execution of the research.

In other cases, I provide key support for students doing independent research. In three cases, this has involved my assuming the final responsibility to satisfy federal or state permit obligations, and in two cases, the provision of the oversight our program requires for independent graduate student field projects that provide undergraduate credit.

Professional Support
Faculty provide critical assistance to students through our interactions with others on behalf of the students. Within the university, this involves making sure the students' interests are fairly represented in evaluations and internal resource allocations (necessitating active participation in one's department). Outside the university, this involves letters of recommendation for such things as jobs or fellowships. Whether students choose job tracks within or outside academia, their interests are served by their mentor's visible participation in the profession, the mentor's networking with colleagues nationally and internationally, and the mentor's introduction of a student into that network. An ancillary benefit of having the fortune to be elected secretary and then president of the Society for American Archaeology (the primary national professional organization for archaeologists) was wide-ranging professional interaction that directly benefited students. I find that professional advice and support is sought long after students are awarded their degrees or get their first jobs.

Personal Motivation and Confidence
A successful mentoring relationship must be based on mutual respect and trust. While it is essential that students know that their mentors are there for them, I don't think one needs to be a confidante (and I rarely find myself in that position). Students must know that you will be responsive whenever they seek help, whether it is assistance on a difficult analytical problem or in writing a letter of support for a job application. They must also know that you keep their interests in mind when they are not present. While students must be able to trust their mentors, students must also earn their mentor's respect. To this end, I am willing to entrust students with important responsibilities. I count on them to get the job done without the need for me to micromanage their performance, and I find that I am rarely disappointed. Finally, I hope that students know that however encouraging I may be, when it comes down to it, I will be straight with them.

Encouraging a high level of professional activity, including publication and participation in professional meetings, not only has obvious direct benefits to students, but it also provides the indirect benefit of increasing their professional self-images. Providing opportunities to co-author papers has proved an excellent form of student encouragement and support and has been most productive for me as well. I have also seen immense value in fostering research collaborations among students. These relationships not only enhance student research productivity but also demonstrate the value of professional collaboration.

Mentoring talented graduate students has long been the single most rewarding aspect of my professional career. Because students realize this interaction is something that I value and enjoy, they feel welcome to discuss things with me. When I am at the university, my door is nearly always open, and at other times I am readily accessible by email or phone. In turn, I find that students have been most considerate of my time, notably when I held national professional offices. Beyond the satisfaction of mentoring, I am grateful to my students for all I learn from them.

I believe that mentors must instill in students the confidence that they can succeed. At the same time, I think that students look to their mentors' careers for evidence that the profession is worth pursuing. If I did not find my own career so rewarding and if I did not so value my own work with graduate students, I very much doubt that I could be a successful mentor. As the relationship matures, the student's relationship to the mentor should increasingly be as a colleague and peer. Students can be transformed into successful professionals well before they finish their degrees, in part, because they reach an appropriate level of professional accomplishment, but also because they see that they have achieved the status of colleagues in the eyes of their mentors.