Have you had the experience that your work with undergraduates doesn’t end at commencement? In your role as advisor and professor, you helped first-year students and sophomores begin to find their way. You guided and supported them as juniors and seniors, when their vocational choices started to narrow with their more developed interests; this ordinary and important work may have culminated with writing a letter of recommendation or giving employers a reference. But now, especially in career-challenged and underemployed domains, have you realized that you continue to advise and mentor some of them long after they’ve graduated?
My own undergraduate professors continued to be primary vocational resources long after graduation, and I remember having many important conversations with them years after I was their student. Having been an advisor and professor of visual arts for 20 years, I have acquired my own small group of former students who know they can seek me out for attention to their vocations. These talented and faithful people, still committed to callings as artists and designers, are in in their mid-20s to early-40s.
In a family memoir, Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss, Margaret Renkl recounts the crucial advice she was given by a former, old-school, undergraduate professor. She ran into him during a period of crisis, having left graduate school twice, and writes, “Clearly I was going nowhere. [. . .] I ended up sitting on his porch for an hour, lamenting the failure of self-knowledge that had led to my miserable fate.”
“Don’t go back [to your graduate program in literature],” he said. “Get your master’s in writing. [. . .] Write poems instead of papers.” Renkl remembers his advice as a “lifeline to a life.” She is now a well-known essayist who has contributed weekly opinion pieces to The New York Times.
My own experience of being available and attentive to the vocations of alumni came to a point of emphasis recently when a former advisee (the very first in my “group”) reached out to me over the holidays; she requested my prayers for her career direction because she was “ripped to shreds” with news that her gallery had not renewed her contract. Her request came at a time when I had just finished reading and rereading Tish Harrison Warren’s splendid 2022 essay, “Making as an Act of Longing and Lament.” Warren’s thesis is, in my opinion, among the most helpful and refreshing encouragements for Christians who are struggling with making as part of their vocations and faith lives.
My dear alumna friend (I’ll call her Leia) emailed me as soon as she received the bad news, and her request for my prayers was laced with disappointment, rejection, confusion, and, although she didn’t mention it specifically, shame. Leia has worked very hard for almost two decades to establish herself as a studio artist and teacher, even while she has raised children and supplemented her family’s income with part-time gigs. She is a fabulous painter, and she has been involved in many community-based projects. She frequently returns to campus to speak to our current students about her vocational journey. She is diligent and generous.
I used the language of friendship and camaraderie to support Leia during this time of emotional upheaval. I also reminded her of her many unchanged blessings—her Christian faith, her loving and supportive family, and her artistic talents. And, taking a cue from Warren’s essay on making, my reply also shared a Christological perspective. Jesus Christ knows her better than she knows herself, and his image, which Leia and I know of since his Incarnation, shines brightly in her dimmed life. It is he who has promised to bless her faithfulness, no matter what that may feel like in the moment.
This is among the arguments developed in Warren’s essay for which I am most grateful: she reminds Christian artists (and their network of support) that they have hope for all things being made new. Her essay begins with a statement about reality: “The task of ‘making’ is always situated in the ‘already-not yet’ of reality”; and concludes with a statement about hope: “But we have also glimpsed—however imperfectly and distantly—the hope of [our work of making] being made new.” Her insights are thus planted between reality and hope. Her essay gives encouragement to Leia, to other artists, and to me by providing clarity to our vocations; we are reaching, albeit through ordinary means in the here and now, for the eschaton, for the expectation of a distant glory. Her essay also reminds us that our experience in the here and now will be characterized by lament; she writes that in our making, we are called back to the reality of the Fall, and we will experience the power of death.
The key difference between advising and mentoring undergraduates and doing the same for working professionals lies in differences of maturation and experience. The heat that the undergraduate feels and the grit required of them during their student journey are usually dissimilar to the experiences of a working professional. The former is a type of early-penultimate, whereas the latter is ultimate. One’s disappointment in a grade is not much like one’s disappointment in a career obstacle. Most traditional undergraduates are working through a reality that has not yet provoked many existential questions because most of their experiences are not yet independent, not yet hardened. You can tell an undergraduate “maker” that they are, in Warren’s concept, being exposed to vulnerability and being taught limitations and being grieved by losses, but most of that remains abstract to them. Two years, five years, ten years out from the excitement of commencement, they frequently tell me, “I remembered this or that thing you told us, and now I know what you meant.”
Here’s my encouragement to undergraduate advisors and mentors in disciplines in which a graduate’s vocation—particularly career development—will be challenged: When the interest in continuing a mentorship is appropriate and mutual, let the graduate know that you are available and accessible to them. Follow up on the new relationship by checking in with them six months after commencement, and then let the relationship develop organically from there. Invite them into your vocation journey as a peer. You will soon find that these peer-alumni relationships can be deeply satisfying both to the graduate and to you. And these relationships with alumni will inform and feed your more regular work with undergraduates as well.
Paul Burmeister is professor of art at Wisconsin Lutheran College, where he is also assistant dean of advising. He is a NetVUE Faculty Fellow, having been a member of the 2019 cohort of NetVUE’s Teaching Vocational Exploration seminar. For other posts by Paul, click here.
