Toward Experiencing Academic Mentorship

The idea of mentorship has become rather fashionable in academia today. Indeed mentorship is claimed, promoted and even mandated as something we can expect to experience as graduate students. Yet what is it really like to experience it? Drawing on concrete descriptions and phenomenological reflection I attend to graduate students’ actual experiences of mentorship (and not mentorship) to uncover aspects of the mentee experience for what it is rather than how it is claimed to be. Graduate students’ experiences reveal ways that mentoring moments variously escape us as somehow deficient or in excess of what we expect them to be. From a vantage that attends specifically to the mentee experience, points of reflection are offered for reimagining what the mentorship experience could become.