Protegee
Even before I started grad school, the advice that people would often give me was: "Think of a range of professors you'd want to work with. You want to avoid being colonized by just one person."
At the time I thought, Duh. Nothing sounded so supremely lame and sycophantic as modelling yourself to be someone else - and moreover, someone who was actually in your life, instead of an abstract idea (eg, "I want to be the next Marlon Brando"). But now that I've done grad school for a few months, my opinion on this topic is starting to change. There's a practical advantage, necessity even, to taking on a master-apprentice relationship. The status of the graduate student is in this odd no-man's land between colleague and student. Professors are not actually interested in teaching you, so much as in testing you and failing you and proving to you that you are in need of improvement. In other words, you're expected to arrive at a certain body of knowledge, but how you get there is anyone's guess.
If the graduate student is extremely proactive, she will self-instruct, seek out the books she needs to read, and hunt down the professors' office hours. But the little known fact about this model grad student is that she is just about the most odious personality you can think of. She IS able to access a "range of professors" to give her a professional advantage because she makes no bones about the fact that she's after recommendations, and not pedagogy or learning for its own sake. The professors acquiesce because she is the most colleague-like, and the least student-like, and that makes their job simple and finite, howevermuch they're just being used.
The more I see of this, the more I'm convinced that I'm incapable of just using people like that. So I turn to the master-apprentice model. In this relationship, the professor has some investment in you as a pedagogical project, since you are the most student-like, and she is willing to give you more guidance in learning the things you need to learn to get to where you're going. It requires some lameness and sycophancy, true; but perhaps the only way to get people to give a rat's ass about you is to stroke their egos. And when I'm evaluating the lesser of two evils, I think it's better to stroke someone's ego whom you genuinely respect, rather than someone from whom you're transparently expecting to network.
At the time I thought, Duh. Nothing sounded so supremely lame and sycophantic as modelling yourself to be someone else - and moreover, someone who was actually in your life, instead of an abstract idea (eg, "I want to be the next Marlon Brando"). But now that I've done grad school for a few months, my opinion on this topic is starting to change. There's a practical advantage, necessity even, to taking on a master-apprentice relationship. The status of the graduate student is in this odd no-man's land between colleague and student. Professors are not actually interested in teaching you, so much as in testing you and failing you and proving to you that you are in need of improvement. In other words, you're expected to arrive at a certain body of knowledge, but how you get there is anyone's guess.
If the graduate student is extremely proactive, she will self-instruct, seek out the books she needs to read, and hunt down the professors' office hours. But the little known fact about this model grad student is that she is just about the most odious personality you can think of. She IS able to access a "range of professors" to give her a professional advantage because she makes no bones about the fact that she's after recommendations, and not pedagogy or learning for its own sake. The professors acquiesce because she is the most colleague-like, and the least student-like, and that makes their job simple and finite, howevermuch they're just being used.
The more I see of this, the more I'm convinced that I'm incapable of just using people like that. So I turn to the master-apprentice model. In this relationship, the professor has some investment in you as a pedagogical project, since you are the most student-like, and she is willing to give you more guidance in learning the things you need to learn to get to where you're going. It requires some lameness and sycophancy, true; but perhaps the only way to get people to give a rat's ass about you is to stroke their egos. And when I'm evaluating the lesser of two evils, I think it's better to stroke someone's ego whom you genuinely respect, rather than someone from whom you're transparently expecting to network.
posted by Rex at 6:44 PM
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