Mentorship Series: Jehan Roberson and Derrick R. Spires
March 3, 2025
As a graduate student, having a positive relationship with your mentor is the linchpin of your success, but how do you build these crucial ties and get the mentoring you need?
This academic year, we’re interviewing faculty-graduate student pairs about what makes their mentoring relationships work. From practical tips to broader perspectives, these Q&As will equip you with ideas and tactics for improving your own mentoring relationships.
This week, we’re speaking with Jehan Roberson, a Ph.D. candidate in English language and literature, and Derrick R. Spires, associate professor of literatures in English at Cornell.
At-a-Glance
For Mentees:
- Identify what mentorship style will work best for you and what type of professional you would like to be and let that inform your search for a mentor.
- Become familiar with your potential mentor’s work in advance of establishing the mentoring relationship to help determine whether it will be a good fit.
- Establish an open channel of communication and strive to be transparent about expectations, deadlines, obstacles, etc.
For Mentors:
- Schedule regular conversations with mentees even if there are no pressing deadlines, as this creates an opportunity to check on progress and have broader conversations about scholarship or professional goals.
- Listen to mentees’ individual concerns and needs and recognize that each mentee is different, requiring a tailored rather than a one-size-fits-all mentoring approach.
- Prioritize mutual respect, trust, and listening, and treat mentees as whole people.
Jehan Roberson, Ph.D. Candidate in English Language and Literature
How did you identify your mentoring needs and how has that self-understanding helped shape your approach to find, foster, and engage in mentoring relationships?
I’m really fortunate in that I was able to identify early on that I wanted to work with Prof. Spires. I came to Cornell for an accepted students’ orientation and was scheduled to meet with him, as a scholar of African American literature. Upon meeting and talking through our mutual research interests, I quickly realized how much our work was/is in alignment and thought that I could learn a lot from Prof. Spires. During my first semester, I took his Speculative Black Fiction course, which was an advanced undergraduate course, but he let me and another student in my cohort take the class, and he met with us separate from the undergrads biweekly to engage in graduate level work. His generosity and dedication to our intellectual growth continues to have a profound impact on me. Beyond the aligned research, I knew Prof. Spires would be an amazing mentor, thought partner, and resource. I also knew his model of teaching and mentorship would be instructive for the type of educator I strive to be.
How do you collaboratively identify and establish mutual expectations around communication, conflict resolution, and other key areas to best work and grow together?
From the beginning, Prof. Spires and I have established open communication as central to our relationship. I’m a non-traditional student, in that I’m older than most of my peers and I’m also a working artist with ongoing projects and collaborations that often require travel, which means that open and honest communication is absolutely critical for navigating these many moving parts. Early on, Prof. Spires asked me to identify some models of the career trajectory I see for myself, which was an incredibly helpful exercise, and he’s been really great with providing guidance and structure for achieving my goals.
What is your best advice for students looking to create and maintain a positive relationship with a mentor?
In terms of establishing a mentor/mentee relationship, especially in terms of faculty, I think it’s important to be familiar with your potential mentor’s work. Do your homework early on. That way, you can determine whether or not someone is a good fit for your work scholarship-wise. I also think it’s important to be able to engage with your mentor as an interlocutor. In reading their scholarship, beyond thematic similarities, it’s important to discern if their methodologies resonate with you. Moreover, it shows that you value your potential mentor beyond the guidance they can offer.
Once the relationship is established, I think it’s crucial to be as transparent about what’s going on with you as you can be—from not understanding a text or a concept, to keeping your mentor aware of when you may need additional support. When I’ve had a personal issue arise, I’ve kept Prof. Spires informed, and he continues to be incredibly understanding and flexible in those instances.
What does it mean to you personally to be a good mentee and partner in a mentor-mentee relationship?
Again, I think transparency is really key. With transparency comes accountability. I know that I work best with external deadlines, so Prof. Spires and I work together to establish a schedule that is structured enough to keep me on track, but fluid enough to accommodate my ongoing artistic commitments and also life events. In this way, I think it’s really important to first be clear with yourself as a mentee about what you need and about what you can reasonably expect from a mentor. I feel incredibly fortunate to have such a supportive (and patient!) mentor, and I don’t take it for granted that he has and continues to invest real time and energy into me and my work. I really value that, and I do my best to show my appreciation through honoring commitments/agreed upon deadlines, deeply engaging and employing feedback on writing, etc.
What do you believe is the key to success in a productive mentor-mentee relationship?
Trust and good communication. I trust Prof. Spires’ knowledge and experience, and I trust that he makes recommendations and offers guidance with my best interests in mind. Ultimately, of course, it’s my decision whether or not to take his advice and apply for a particular fellowship, for example. But I’m thankful because I know he will not only support my decision, but also make himself available to talk through the decision-making process.
Derrick R. Spires, Associate Professor of Literatures in English
What positive or negative experiences inform your approach to mentorship or help shape your philosophy?
My approach to mentoring is largely informed by my own mentors (past and present), who have consistently approached mentoring with a few key principles in mind: 1) don’t suffer in silence, 2) do good work, and 3) mentors create space for mentees to follow their interests, inclinations, and passions; and they also help them create structure and direction for these interests, inclinations, and passions.
I was the first person in my family to pursue a Ph.D. I was very successful as a graduate student but struggled with the dissertation and writing longer projects in general. As a result, I hit a serious wall and took about a year to recover and retool. I didn’t know what I didn’t know, and a series of mentors/advisors stepped into the gaps, often without my asking (because I didn’t know what to ask or that I could and should ask), to provide the kinds of support that I didn’t know I needed.
What makes mentoring important to you?
It is the most rewarding and most challenging part of my professional life. I graduated from Tougaloo College, a small HBCU where the abiding ethos is that Tougaloo pours into its students so that they, in turn, can pour into others. I also come from a community where people support each other, because that’s what we do and that’s how life works. It would be strange not to want to support others as they come along.
How do you collaboratively identify and establish mutual expectations around communication, conflict resolution, and other key areas to best work and grow together?
I like to schedule conversations with mentees at regular intervals so that we have something on the books even when there’s nothing particularly pressing at the moment. These sessions often become spaces for checking in on progress, as well as for talking about the profession and scholarship more generally. I try to be up front and open about my own expectations, and we have conversations that allow us to set reasonable goals and benchmarks. Allowing time for mutual listening is crucial, and establishing the expectation that our meetings are spaces where I listen early in the mentoring relationship sets the tone for our work together.
What is your process to review and refine your mentoring agreement to ensure it is timely and contextually relevant based upon the mentee’s academic and professional standing and progress? For example, needs for a pre A-exam student will be different from those of a doctoral candidate on the job market.
At each stage, I try to listen to a mentee’s concerns and needs first. Each mentee is different, and assuming that the same processes, timelines, and strategies will work for every mentee can perpetuate inequalities and lead to more serious issues down the road. Before and after each big milestone, we have several conversations about building strong habits, how that milestone fits within a larger trajectory, and how my mentee can tailor the process of A-exams, for instance, to meet their specific intellectual and personal needs. We also check in about what those needs and goals are, because they shift over time. I establish space where mentees feel comfortable asking questions, no matter how “basic” they may seem on the face of it, because sometimes I don’t have a clear sense of what a mentee doesn’t know or know how to ask. Finally, it’s important to me to have open communication with colleagues whenever possible so that we’re on the same page in terms of meeting students’ needs.
More broadly, I try to model scholarly collaboration and humility: I share my own professional and teaching documents, connect mentees across institutions to build peer mentoring groups and widen networks, and introduce students to networks of support that speak to their particular career stages and interests. I show and talk through how I work and engage in collaboration. At the same time, I’m really open about the (many) times I’ve gotten things wrong or made the work harder than it needed to be so that, hopefully, mentees can either avoid those pitfalls or be better equipped to handle them—because some mistakes are unavoidable, even necessary, for learning. The whole point is for my mentees to exceed me.
What do you believe is the key to success in a productive mentor-mentee relationship?
- Mutual respect, trust, and listening.
- Treating mentees as whole people with the goal of creating the spaces and conditions for them to grow in the ways that are fulfilling for them, even if (or especially when) that growth takes them away from academia.