Manuel Barrera Jr.,
Professor of Psychology

Graduate Mentoring: Nurturing Interests and Competencies

Much of what I have written about my mentoring philosophy was inferred following my review of the thirty-something master's theses and dissertations I have chaired, and after retrieving memories of my 18-plus years of graduate training at Arizona State University. I do believe that even before I was asked to write an essay about my philosophy of mentoring, I was, in fact, aware of three principles that I used in my mentoring of graduate students, particularly in stages devoted to the selection of research topics.

Experience emotional attachment to the topic. I encourage students to select topics that stimulate some passion. Certain aspects of the science process require dispassionate, objective views of the evidence, but an emotional connection to research topics elevates the creative process and sustains researchers through the many tedious activities. For many of my students, the emotional connection they had to thesis or dissertation topics is still reflected in their professional work. Dr. John Dignam, who did his master's thesis and dissertation research on correctional facility staff members, is now a chief psychologist in the federal correctional system. Dr. Carolynne Garrison-Jones, who studied adolescents who were hospitalized in psychiatric facilities, continues to conduct clinical work with hospitalized children and teaches these methods as an adjunct faculty member in our department. Dr. Diana Oxley, who wondered how community and work setting size affected individuals' social relationships and involvement in the settings, now studies how school environments influence student performance and adjustment.

Become an expert. Although the knowledge base is changing constantly, I challenge students to become an expert on the topic they ultimately select. At the very least, this requires the student to engage in a scholarly critique of empirical research and theoretical papers. Doing good scholarship is as important as doing good original research and is probably as difficult to teach and learn. I also advocate learning about a topic by experiencing it as directly as possible. Within clinical psychology graduate programs, it is possible to breathe life into certain topics by simultaneously combining clinical experience and research. For example, it is possible for clinical faculty and graduate students to not only conduct basic field research on family conflict, but to also learn about this topic by working with troubled families in clinical settings where the objective is to change dysfunctional behavior. I recall supervising two of my current students on clinical cases that called for them to teach their clients new parenting behaviors. During the same time I was chairing their master's thesis research that dealt with the influence of parenting behaviors on the psychological adjustment of adolescents. I think both research and practice are enriched when students have simultaneous involvement in each. The influential psychologist Kurt Lewin is credited with saying that the best way to understand a problem is to try to change it. I believe in this concept. One of my future goals as a mentor is to implement this concept more systematically in the training of my students and in my own research.

Exercise great care in making the final products. I will never be a prolific researcher, but I do pride myself in producing work that is thorough and potentially influential. I try to model obsessional behaviors that convey to my students the importance of doing careful work. In academia, speed and quantity of production are sometimes the yardsticks for measuring success. They are convenient measures because they are quantified easily. Less convenient measures of quality include evaluations by peers, also personal evaluations of what is worthwhile and important to the researcher. Encouraging students to achieve quality in their work, helping them develop a sensitivity to the qualitative judgments of others, and assisting in the formation of internal standards of quality are important objectives of mentoring. My most gratifying moments as a mentor are when I recognize that my students have adopted high standards of quality for their research and have strived to achieve them. Recently, a well-known sabbatical visitor from Europe asked if she could attend the master's thesis defense of one of my students. Following the exam and after carefully reading the final manuscript, the sabbatical visitor was in awe of the work. She could not believe that it was the student's master's thesis and not her dissertation. I knew I had eclipsed a developmental milestone as a mentor when I experienced pride from my student's accomplishment that was at least as gratifying as the pride of a personal accomplishment. This event was particularly uplifting because it was clear that the student had established and met standards for her work that were higher than my own, the sabbatical visitor, or other members of her committee.

Students as Colleagues

One of the true paradoxes I have discovered is that the less I treat my students as students, the more effective I am as a graduate teacher. Stated less obscurely, graduate students achieve special benefits when they act in the role of a colleague-collaborator rather than in the role of a passive recipient of instruction. This principle is related to similar ideas such as (a) the "helper therapy principle," which states that in helping transactions, the helper gains more benefits from providing help than the recipient does in getting it, or (b) the "teacher-learner principle," which states that the best way to learn material is to teach it. When graduate students become collaborators, they are placed in positions of responsibility where they help the mentor and the mentor helps them, and there are opportunities for the student to teach the mentor about areas of his or her expertise. Obviously, most students are not prepared to be full collaborators in research the minute they arrive on campus. However, a principle of mentoring is to move students into this role as soon as possible. As an Assistant Professor, I was intimidated by the thought that graduate students would know more than I did. Now, I regularly expect my students to know more than I do in certain areas by their third year, particularly in specialty areas that have been developed since my own graduate training. In our research on adolescent children of alcoholics, we rely on graduate student collaborators to be the experts on state-of-the-art data analytic procedures. Our reliance on them as collaborators has been a force behind their development of competencies.

In preparing for this essay, I reviewed my publications with students and was reminded of how integral they were in the development of my main program of research. Until 1991, graduate students and not other faculty members were my main collaborators. My research was enriched by this collaboration, particularly when students' thesis research dealt with populations, settings, and research questions that were somewhat tangential to my own interests.

Respecting Diversity

From my recollection of remarks made by Dean Brian Foster last year, I believe our clinical psychology graduate program is the most selective graduate program in the university. This past year we received nearly 600 applications from which we selected a new class of six students. Despite the high caliber of students and the homogeneity of their grades and GRE scores, I continue to be amazed by their heterogeneity. One source of heterogeneity is the strength of their commitment to research and clinical practice. Because of some quirks of history, clinical psychology is both a subdiscipline of psychological science and a profession that asserts the Ph.D. as the preferred degree for professional practice. Clinical psychology is unique in this respect. Other professions such as medicine, dentistry, and law certainly do not require the Ph.D., and they have distinct degrees that reflect the emphasis on professional training (e.g., M.D., D.D.S., and J.D.).

Because we are a scientist-practitioner program, we select students who appear to have significant interests in both research and clinical applications. However, after moving through courses, practica, and research experiences, students sometimes favor either clinical practice or research as career goals. Although I preach the virtues of academic and research careers, many of my students, like many of the other students who have graduated from our program, have started their careers in applied settings. My deepest commitment is to train students in conducting psychological research, but I have not withdrawn my mentoring relationship from those students who discover that their contribution as a scientist-practitioner will be in applied settings rather than in research or academia. Accepting differences in values and interests that students bring to the mentoring relationship is another principle that characterizes my graduate teaching.

The racial and ethnic diversity of our students is another source of heterogeneity in our graduate program. I am proud of the role I have played in adding to the diversity of our graduate students through recruitment efforts, as well as fostering the development of minority students by serving as a chair or committee member. My very first graduate student was a student from Costa Rica who is now a faculty member in his native country. I have served as the chair for at least eight minority graduate students and as a committee member for seven others.

In my early years on the faculty we used recruitment trips to publicize our graduate program and meet prospective students. On my very first recruitment trip as a new Assistant Professor, I traveled to UCLA where I was successful in recruiting Kurt Organista and Finetta Reese to ASU. Dr. Organista is now an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and Dr. Reese is an Assistant Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. Pam Balls, a third student I recruited on a trip to St. Louis, is an Assistant Professor at the University of San Francisco. Since 1978 I have been involved in writing our department's application for Patricia Roberts Harris (formerly G*POP) Fellowships, which provide up to three years of graduate assistant support for ethnic minority graduate students. These grants have supported ten different minority students in our department. In addition, I have been the mentor for two of the four American Psychological Association Minority Fellows we have had in our department. Our faculty's recruitment activities and other efforts to increase ethnic diversity of psychology are not always successful, but it is rewarding to acknowledge the contributions we have made.

My work with minority students and with a heterogeneous group of majority students is consistent with the value I place on diversity. Graduate mentors are often accused of trying to produce a group of clones who are highly similar to themselves. I certainly have worked with students who have had interests and values that are similar to my own, but I view myself as having a broad band of tolerance for students who bring ideas and personal characteristics that differ from mine. The challenge of understanding the individuality of graduate students, contributing to their personal agendas, and witnessing the emergence of new competencies are the rewards of graduate teaching. I am truly grateful to the graduate students I have worked with over the years for the opportunity to experience these rewards.