Mentorship can take many forms, and sometimes we cross paths with people with whom we unexpectedly form significant relationships that prompt us to see our lives in new and different ways. Last week, in his newsletter for The Chronicle of Higher Education, Scott Carlson included an essay by Ben Gambuzza, an undergraduate student he met in 2019 when he gave a talk at Trinity College about “writing, college, and the future of work.” After the talk, Scott took on Ben as a mentee, and when Ben proposed writing a piece on mentorship for Scott’s newsletter, Scott supported his efforts and published Ben’s essay last week. In it, Ben tells the story of his serendipitous encounter with a music professor who became one of his most important mentors. This professor didn’t always provide Ben with concrete answers to his questions, but he helped him refine the kinds of questions he was asking about himself and his future. Readers of Vocation Matters interested in the role of mentoring and vocational exploration will find much to appreciate in Ben’s essay, which is included in its entirety below.
This piece by Ben Gambuzza was originally featured in Scott Carlson’s newsletter The Edge, which is published by The Chronicle of Higher Education. Vocation Matters is grateful for the permission to repost it for our readers. If you wish to access the original essay, you can go to last week’s issue of the newsletter published on December 4, 2025, but you will need a subscription to view it.
The Mentor I Didn’t Know I Needed
By Ben Gambuzza
In my freshman year, a music professor I’ll call Professor J taught me something you wouldn’t find in the department’s curriculum: how to smooth down the pages of a book of sheet music.
I first met Professor J in an empty classroom with a Steinway grand, where I would sometimes practice between classes. Back then, when I played from a book of sheet music, the pages would often refuse to lay flat and drift forward, sending me into fits of rage. I would slap a page back into place, sometimes ripping it out, or I’d grab the volume with two hands and bend the spine until it broke. Sometimes I’d pick up the book and hurl it across the room.
It was misdirected anger: I hadn’t tried to get into a conservatory, and I resented myself for it. I wanted someone else to see this regret, help me channel it in a positive direction, and give me a semblance of what I was missing. Also, my parents had recently divorced, dissolving the trust I had in my primary relationship to adults. I was looking for guidance outside of the classroom. I didn’t know it at the time, but what I needed was a mentor.
Then one day, as I was practicing in that empty room, a smiling, stout man with relaxed shoulders shuffled through the door. He didn’t greet me but immediately proceeded to wax poetic about the music I was playing.
Sometimes it’s hardest to remember the beginnings of those relationships that are most important to you. All I recall is cacophony. He spoke metaphysically—he talked about being present and emphasized the importance of the here. He pulled polysyllabic German words out of thin air. His gentle voice modulated up and down with emotion, and he laughed heartily. He was a music therapist as well as a music teacher, and the way he spoke about music suggested that there was much more to the subject than what I was learning in the classroom.
After this initial flood of language, he invited me to sight-read with him. Before long, we had a standing date every week to play sonatas together: Bach, Mozart, Brahms—he on violin and me on piano.
Today, as professors are burdened with more administrative duties, clerical responsibilities, teaching, and their own scholarship, the mentorship of undergraduates is falling by the wayside. Students want their professors to act as mentors—and in many cases, they need a mentor to make a successful transition from college—but they often need to initiate the relationship. In a 2024 survey by Inside Higher Ed, over half of students believed that their professors should be mentors who help them figure out their careers. Low-income and first-generation students and students of color especially benefit from having mentors during the transition into college. Once a mentorship is established, the mentee gains access to a potential constellation of peers in the mentor’s network, which is crucial for those students who can’t call on well-connected people in their own families.
Once a mentor and mentee find each other (there is often some serendipity involved), their companionship can offer the mentee a refreshing counterpoint to pressure from other adults, like parents or teachers, or even from friends—the people around you who are always telling you what you should do. A mentor can seem more distant than these other figures, which may lead to some ambiguity for the student but also more freedom. A mentee can thus feel safe to explore interests and practice skills, like classical piano, that may not be considered popular by his peers or even worthwhile by his parents.
All it takes is a little curiosity. I never took one of Professor J’s classes. He never graded my tests or read my essays. He only heard me talk and play. He just poked his head into an empty classroom because he heard some unknown student playing the piano.
Meditation, and resentment
At the start of one of our standing practice sessions, I saw the top of Professor J’s head in the door window as he entered, plopped a stack of sheet music onto the lid of the piano, and picked from the top a brand-new edition of the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg’s violin sonatas. He placed the piano part on the stand above my keyboard and spread the violin part flat on the lid of the piano so he could read it. After one mutual rhythmic breath, we were off playing the first movement.
Within the first couple of page turns, the paper began to misbehave. My face felt hot with rage as I held back the page with my right hand while my left hand played alone. Soon, I was lost and told Professor J I had to stop.
He remained calm, put down his instrument, and said that when you buy a new book of sheet music, there is one thing you must always do.
He turned the book over and opened it from the back cover first, then placed his palm on the interior center of the spine and ran his hand up and down the binding, applying pressure as he went. The spine crackled but didn’t break. He flipped the page, did it again. As he made his way toward the midpoint of the edition, the book began to relax, melt in his hands. When he got to the middle, he returned to the front cover and started working his way toward the middle.
As he worked, he narrated: The repetitive motion makes this ceremony almost ritualistic, meditative, he explained. Massaging the book this way not only helps the pages lay down, but also makes you feel more at one with the music. The thorny passages beyond the current page won’t be a mystery anymore, since you’ve spent time with and looked at and touched every page. When he was done, he returned the book to the stand above my keyboard. It seemed to say, “OK. I’m here now. Let’s play.”
This proved to be an effective technique, which I still use, not just to flatten the pages but also to bring calm and familiarize myself with the music before I play it. Mentorship can offer practices that are part of a hidden curriculum within a discipline. This puts a mentee further down the road to mastery, because he is learning—through a kind of oral tradition—tricks of the trade that aren’t always taught in school.
Professor J’s eccentric ways of giving advice could also seem like showing off how peculiar and erudite he was. I sometimes resented him for it. But he was just a mirror. Looking back, I see now that I also like to spin off into abstract discussions, and I was just seeing qualities of myself in him.
Resentment found its way into our relationship in more practical ways. We would sometimes get coffee, and I would ask him questions about my future. How do I make performing piano a part of my career after graduating from a liberal-arts school? What are some careers that mix writing and playing music? Can you help me get a job? He’d answer my questions with more questions, usually unrelated to the matter at hand. Do you know the German concept of Bildung? Have you heard the music of Wilhelm Kienzl? Did you read this wonderful op-ed about the liberal arts? After a while, I started to wish for a “better” mentor.
The thing is, he knew I’m a contrarian and that the only person I listen to is myself. I eventually began to see that his approach to mentorship—which probably owed something to his music-therapy practice—was the same meditative approach he took to smoothing out that sheet music. What I needed was a space to ask myself better questions. I came to realize our time together was that space.
If professors are to continue mentoring undergraduates, maybe we need a different idea of what mentorship is: less about giving students straight-ahead career advice, and more about helping a student ask himself the right questions about what he really wants. The classroom and the career office offer one set of paths. A mentor can offer another, sometimes frustratingly oblique, set of paths. Or no path at all. It is an opportunity to teach self-reliance.
Mentorship does not necessarily have to lead to anything. Mentorship can be play. Sometimes that’s playing music, and sometimes that’s playing with the ideas of your life.
Scott Carlson offers this recommendation at the end of Ben’s essay: “If you want to read more of Ben’s work on music and culture, check out his Substack, Evenings with the Orchestra, look up his articles in The Village Voice and other publications, and listen to his classical-music show, “The Best is Noise,” on Radio Free Brooklyn.”
Geoffrey W. Bateman is the editor of Vocation Matters.
