Viewpoint - Featured Mentor: Ricordo Cortez, PhD

Dr. Ricardo CortezQ; Do you have advice for students who find it difficult to approach faculty for support? How can we make the process less intimidating?

This can be a tricky issue for students. It might be helpful to remember that faculty members understand the need to support students—they are used to trying to find funding for their students. Here are some things to keep in mind:

Be direct. A good approach is to make an appointment with the faculty member and get to the point right away. You can say: “Dr. Cortez, I want to ask you for advice on finding external support for next year in order to focus on my research. I wonder if you know about external fellowships, scholarships, or research assistantships that I would qualify for.” This opens the door for the conversation. During that conversation, if the faculty member does not bring it up, you should ask: “Do you have the ability to offer a research assistantship?”

Prepare ahead of time. Do your homework—look into fellowships and scholarships ahead of time so you can talk specifically about programs you’ve found. If you find it particularly intimidating, you could practice your questions with your mentor or with someone who has done it before. But always remember that for the faculty member, this is a part of his or her job, and he or she will try to help.

Don’t be shy. This is not a time to be shy, which may be difficult for some people. Remember, the worst thing that can happen is they say no.

Don’t be discouraged. Faculty members’ ability to support students varies—there are years when they have funds and years when they really don’t.

Q: In your experience, what makes a good mentor?

A good mentor is a little like a parent—she is always looking for opportunities that will improve the student’s life and professional career, and she leads by example.

In summary, a mentor has the following qualities:

Is accessible and committed. A good mentor makes it comfortable for students to approach him, actively contacts students who may need extra encouragement, and is genuinely interested in what the students have to say. Commitment implies that a mentor accepts to take on that role indefinitely; a mentor is committed to seeing a student through one—or several—“next steps” in the student’s career.

A mentor is active. A good mentor actively contacts students with appropriate academic and research opportunities, writes letters of recommendation or guides the student to someone who can, creates opportunities to talk to students about future careers, and gets to know students’ interests enough to point them to activities that will prepare them.

Leads by example. A good mentor understands that students may view her as a role model—they observe her professional behavior. For example, if students attend a seminar given by a mentor, they will pay attention to the way she handles questions and how she treats the people asking them. Students will adopt professional qualities they see in the mentor, such as follow-through in her research projects, meeting her responsibilities in the classroom, being fair, keeping her appointments, and so on.

In my experience, when I come to a new or difficult moment in my career, I have asked myself: How would my mentor handle this? A good mentor will realize that his students will be asking themselves this question and will act accordingly.

Q: Was there ever any point in your education or career where you lacked self-confidence? How did you regain your confidence?

Definitely! This has happened to me as a graduate student, as a postdoc, and also as a faculty member. I’m happy to report that the frequency and intensity goes down with career advancement. The feeling of low confidence often is accompanied by thoughts that other people are more successful (or somehow better) than I am. What helps me in those situations is to list my own recent accomplishments, no matter how small they might be. Maybe I got one of the few A’s in a class, or I received a higher-than-average teaching evaluation, or perhaps my latest research idea has some potential. Any small accomplishment helps me become more objective about my thoughts of self-confidence, which is a good first step. It also helps never to keep those feelings to myself. I talk to a mentor, and her pep talk usually includes personal examples that were much more dire than mine, and yet ultimately, were ones she overcame. The goal is to regain objectivity and realize that while self-confidence fluctuates, we all have accomplishments we can and should be proud of.

Author

Dr. Ricardo Cortez received the 2010 SACNAS Distinguished Undergraduate Institution Mentor Award. He is the Pendergraft William Larkin Duren Professor of Mathematics and director of the Center for Computational Science at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. Reach him at rcortez@tulane.edu.

Image Details

Dr. Ricardo Cortez participated in the Conversations with Scientists activity at the 2010 SACNAS National Conference.

Related Resources

View full edition of the Summer/Fall 2011 SACNAS News