Tag: mentoring

Conversations on Craft and Career: Guiding Passionate Students

This post discusses the challenges faced by professors and students in non-career-focused majors, who often encounter pressure to prioritize economic returns. It highlights the importance of supporting these students in pursuing their passions while managing potential regrets. The author emphasizes the enduring value of craft and its impact on cultural legacy.

photo of woman wearing white long sleeves and black pants while sitting on floor looking pensive
Photo by Nataliya Vaitkevich on Pexels.com

It’s true: there are still some professors and students who choose fields of study and complete majors that don’t solely open career pathways. It’s true: faculty and students in these majors must withstand the relentless and usually unsophisticated pressures from parents and peers to resist academic preparations aimed primarily at a short-term return on economic investment. It’s true: faculty and students in these majors feel marginalized and devalued for their calling, which is viewed as irrelevant and archaic, or worse, irresponsible and regressive.

For mentors and advisors in these areas, the challenge remains: how does one begin an effective conversation with students who are interested in educational opportunities outside the narrowing focus on career preparation?

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Mentoring for Vocation: Maria LaMonaca Wisdom

In a recent NetVUE podcast, Maria LaMonaca Wisdom discusses her role as assistant vice provost for faculty advancement at Duke University. She emphasizes the importance of mentoring in fostering growth and personal relationships, while highlighting the need for revision and change in vocational paths. Mentors illuminate potential and inspire hope in students.

Maria LaMonaca Wisdom

In the most recent episode of NetVUE’s podcast Callings, hosts Erin VanLaningham and John Barton interview Maria LaMonaca Wisdom, a leading voice on mentoring and coaching in higher education. Maria is the assistant vice provost for faculty advancement at Duke University, where she focuses on helping faculty flourish as researchers, educators, mentors, and leaders. In this role, she offers group coaching programs along with 1:1 coaching to faculty at critical transition points of their careers. She is also the author of How to Mentor Anyone in Academia, published recently by Princeton University Press, which offers methods and approaches to understand the mentor role. No stranger to undergraduate education, Maria is a former Lilly Fellow and holds a PhD in English; she taught literature for a decade at a small liberal arts college before pivoting to her work as an administrator.

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The Power of Unexpected Mentorship

Mentorship can profoundly influence personal growth, as illustrated by Ben Gambuzza’s experience with a music professor, referred to as Professor J. Their connection encouraged Ben to explore deeper questions about himself and his future. Through unconventional guidance, Professor J taught Ben valuable lessons that transcended traditional classroom learning, emphasizing self-discovery over direct career advice.

Scott Carlson, senior writer at The Chronicle.

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.

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Called to Be Interrupted: Redefining Vocation through Academic Mentoring

Drawing inspiration from Tolkien’s “Leaf by Niggle,” this post reflects on the tension between personal achievement and mentoring in academia. Austin Young Shull argues that interactions with students, often seen as interruptions, are essential to his vocation as a scientist and professor. This re-framing reveals how contributions to others’ success expand one’s calling beyond individual work.

“Niggle was a painter. Not a very successful one, partly because he had many other things to do.”

—“Leaf by Niggle,” J.R.R. Tolkien

I have a confession to make: as a scientist, I rarely accomplish what I set out to do, and this inability to measure up to my own expectations disheartens me. This feeling often stems from the perpetual tension between an idealized vision of what my work should produce and the constant interruptions that prevent me from realizing this vision. This tension animates J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Leaf by Niggle,” a short story that not only comforts me, but has also challenged me to rethink the values at the heart of my understanding of my vocation.

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Improving Vocation Efforts on Campus with NetVUE Focused Consultations

NetVUE’s November webinar featured experts sharing experiences and strategies for maximizing campus consultation at NetVUE institutions focused on enhancing vocation-related programming. Contributors included Deirdre Egan-Ryan, Sheila Bauer-Gatsos, Cyndi Grobmeier, and Jonathan Redding, who discussed curriculum, faculty development, and streamlining vocational efforts across programs, concluding with participant questions.

Over the past few months, a significant number of NetVUE institutions have hosted focused consultations on their campuses to strategize about vocation-related work. NetVUE’s November webinar explored the benefits of working with peer experts and the creative ideas, objective perspectives, and professional validation they offer. On November 18, the featured speakers discussed their experiences and strategies on how to make the most out of focused consultations to enhance vocation programming.

From left to right: Deirdre Egan-Ryan, Cyndi Grobmeier, Jonathan Redding, and Sheila Bauer-Gatsos.
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Our Work Doesn’t End at Commencement

Have you had the experience that your work with undergraduates doesn’t end at commencement?

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?

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Mentoring in Community

There is value in the constancy of a single, life-long mentor, but what incredible ego to think that I—and I alone—can or should play such a singular role in any person’s life. There is another kind of value in a mentorship community made up of diverse voices, experiences, and perspectives—a community made up of people who come and go, who agree and disagree, who give different kinds of advice, who model different choices, and who collectively open up all kinds of ways to think, do, and live in the world.

Throughout my career as a university educator, I have mentored dozens of college students during a concentrated and intentional season of their vocational discernment, specifically young women interested in the vocational possibilities of literacy, storytelling, and advocacy. Many of these are students of literature, writing, and education, but they are also students of film, theology, social work, psychology, physical therapy, chemistry, and engineering. Sometimes we meet for an official meeting in my office, but more often mentorship looks like a quick hallway chat, a wave across the library, a text message update, a walk around campus, catching up over coffee and then more coffee, an internship program forwarded by email, comments on a class assignment, or advice on a job application. In my experience, mentoring these students involves a series of tiny and ordinary moments that can sometimes stretch out over several years but that usually end, often abruptly.

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Embracing Uncertainty: Parallels Between the Scientific Method and Vocational Discernment

We are exploring how to frame conversations with students about vocation in terms that they will recognize from their scientific training. By connecting the language of scientific process with vocational discernment, we hope to foster deeper conversations with students about their callings and how their knowledge, strengths, and interests might align in unique ways with the needs of their communities.

(Austin) I recently hosted a career panel for our science majors at my college. During this panel, students had the opportunity to hear from fantastic individuals who were doing exciting and fulfilling work in careers like healthcare diagnostics, pharmaceutical management, and biotech research and development. The students heard compelling stories about the winding and fortuitous journeys that led the panelists to their current vocations. Since the panelists were alumni of the college and had been in the same position as my students a decade ago, I was excited about how current students might gain confidence in pursuit of their own unique and creative paths.

After the panel, I held a feedback session for my students. I anticipated their excitement about potential careers and where they might be called. However, they seemed more nervously overwhelmed than awestruck. The sentiment in the room was summarized by a student who said,

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Sometimes It’s the Small Things: The Power of Chats

How many of our students have been and could be assisted on their journeys simply by our thoughtful questioning and attentive listening?

David Crowley talks with student Maria Gaughan about the formative power of small conversations as part of a series in which faculty members interview students about vocational exploration.
David Crowley

Last summer I accompanied a group of 20 college students on a vocation-focused overseas trip. Compounding my fear of losing either the students themselves or their voluminous documentation (so many COVID test results, health forms, and printed itineraries!) was the fact that I did not know most of these students; they were members of two COVID-disrupted cohorts of Assumption University’s SOPHIA program, a yearlong vocational discernment experience for sophomores that culminates in a trip to Rome. I had not served as a SOPHIA mentor for these students, and I had never met most of them through advising or a class, so they were strangers to me…and I was a stranger to them.

Maria Gaughan

One student whose reputation had preceded her was rising senior Maria Gaughan. I had heard that Maria was an excellent student who was doing impressive research with one of my colleagues in the biology department. I was looking for allies on this trip and jumped at the chance to speak with Maria on the bus ride to the airport. This became the first of many fruitful conversations for us, but, as I have come to discover, I was just the latest of Maria’s formative conversation partners. Last fall, I invited her to join a student panel at our NetVUE regional gathering on mentoring in the sciences. At this event, she caught the attention of many participants, including the editor of this blog. What follows are excerpts of Maria’s reflections on seemingly small mentoring moments with big vocational impacts–what she calls “chats.”

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I Was Once in Their Shoes: Exploring Vocation in the Health Professions

For the students who lack knowledge about vocational opportunities in the health professions, our focus should be on increasing awareness and exploration. For the students who lack the educational foundation, knowledge or skills to succeed, our approach should be different.

A series of posts about a collaborative project at the University of Dayton to develop courses, programs, and opportunities for undergraduate vocational discernment in the health professions, including a first-year course, “Discover Health and Medicine.”

 “I’ve always wanted to help people” or “I’ve always wanted to be a doctor” are common student responses when I ask them why they are interested in pursuing a career in the health professions. This is true particularly among those students who were not initially accepted into a health professions major or who are struggling in classes and second-guessing themselves. Each time I hear one of these statements, it takes me back to my own experience as a teenager and as a first-year college student. I, too, was that student who decided at age twelve that I wanted to be a doctor. I was that student who excelled in science classes in high school but for whom first-year chemistry and biology were unexpected, anxiety-provoking struggles.

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