Alexander Rosenberg
R. Taylor Cole Professor of Philosophy & Professor of Biology
Alex Rosenberg helps his graduate students make job contacts, writes detailed recommendation letters, sends e-mails and follows up with phone calls - basically, he does whatever it takes to help them land a job. It's this extra effort that helped earn Rosenberg a Dean's Award for Excellence in Mentoring. One student who nominated Rosenberg for the award said, “When you need him to be your bulldog, he will.”
Rosenberg, the R. Taylor Cole professor of philosophy, said mentoring is an important responsibility for faculty members in graduate programs. “It's not enough to provide formal structure and preparation, because there is also a whole lot of acculturation and informal information that has to be communicated to students,” he said. Philosophy is a crowded discipline, and it's a mentor's job to advocate for his or her students to help them find jobs after graduation, he added.
For the second year, the Graduate School has offered an award to three professors who, in the eyes of their students, are outstanding mentors. Other winners this year include Linda K. George of sociology and psychology and William Reichert of biomedical engineering. “My first piece of advice for students looking for a mentor is to take your faculty member to lunch to find out what the chemistries are,” Rosenberg said. He often eats lunch with students “because lots of good things happen at lunch,” and brings along other professors so it feels like a community.
Another important aspect of mentoring, Rosenberg said, is helping “students make the best of their opportunities” and he does this by sponsoring students to travel to conferences in their fields, bringing in outside experts, and co-authoring papers with them. “I don't need to write more papers,” he said, “but they do. If I can harness my interests together with theirs to their advantage, not only to have a byline but to work with someone to see what kind of standards you have to impose on yourself and how important it is to persevere, revise and update, and not to be disappointed by rejections, that should be part of their professional education.”
It's not simply about helping them get a job, however, Rosenberg added. “You are helping them acquire skills that will make them effective members of the profession.” He assists with students' presentation skills, for example. Rosenberg and one of his teaching assistants were recently invited to Paris to present a paper they had co-authored. The hosts had expected Rosenberg to give the talk, but he instead suggested the student deliver it. Rosenberg sat in the audience and later advised the student on his delivery.
His primary motivation for mentoring is the feeling he gets when a student succeeds and the knowledge that he had a hand in that success. “I get a lot of satisfaction out of it,” he said, adding that mentoring “isn't just about graduate students. It is about building very important relationships.” Building those relationships takes time and motivation, and his status in the philosophy department gives him both. Assistant and associate professors, for the most part, can't take the time to be mentors without sacrificing their own job prospects, he said. As a senior professor, he has “written enough papers and books,” and he can use more of his energy on the education of graduate students. He even wants to use the proceeds of this award for their benefit. The award brings with it $2,000, and, instead of taking it as salary, “I want to put it in my research grant so I can use it to send more students to conferences.”
-Shari Metzger
Reprinted from Dialogue (April 15, 2005) with permission from Duke News Service.