Very few of the experiences I’ve learned and grown from over the years would have materialized were it not for the people who guided, supported, questioned, and encouraged me along the way. Because of this, I’m a big believer in the value of mentorship: I seek it out wherever possible, and I’ve maintained a regular availability for serving as a mentor to others for the past 8 years.
As a result, I’m also always eager to learn more about how other people experience mentorship. I was struck, in a recent reading of Gary Stevenson’s The Trading Game, by how he described an exchange with a more senior trader shortly after he started interning at Citibank:
“This started him on a long monologue about trading and his journey within it, of which I did not understand much. He showed me graphs and told me many stories. I looked into Johnny’s eyes, I looked at the graphs. I looked into the middle distance, and thought. Or at least, I narrowed my eyes to give the sense of thinking. I wondered if he could tell that I didn’t understand.
I cannot emphasize enough how much of my early experience of trading consisted of this. Of listening to traders, of nodding along sagely, of pulling the faces of a boy thinking deeply, and of understanding nothing at all.”
In my experience, those who have been dissatisfied with their experiences of mentorship have expected something a bit more substantive than this. They’ve expected, for example, that mentorship would involve more than just—essentially—sitting around with others who were more senior than them in some way, more than just listening to what they had to share without understanding very much of how it all worked or what it might mean for their career.
Too often, in those cases, there’s an expectation that a mentor will offer a clear-cut answer, a distinctly measurable outcome, or some piece of advice that will be immediately actionable. In reality, it’s a lot of gradually piecing together little bits of insight that, on their own, don’t necessarily look like much.
My co-author on Deep Literacy, Digital Time, Miranda Dunham-Hickman, spoke about this in a recent interview. She describes an exchange with a more senior colleague early on in her career during which the two of them had a “really good conversation”:
“That kind of mentorship was scarce — it was somewhat hard to get people’s attention for your work beyond one’s immediate circle — and yet we spent a couple of hours talking things through … I remember laughter and a sense of discovery, learning a great deal through exchange, and through tone.”
Notice what’s being highlighted here: the impact of a conversation, and of learning “through tone.” She goes on to offer another example of informal mentorship, this time in connection with an essay she’d written:
“I also remember another strange moment — I suppose these are the forms in which mentorship arrives — that, when I was in graduate school, I received an acceptance from a journal called Paideuma, at the time focused on Pound studies. Most of us weren’t publishing, at that time, during doctoral work. … I still remember just deciding that I was going to send in an article because something had been going right with one of the papers that I’d been writing on Ezra Pound and his connection to deluxe editions. I found Paideuma, and I decided to send in the essay. And the senior editor — who was a grand figure of Pound studies, Carroll Terrell, who did the companion to Ezra Pound’s Cantos — wrote back; it was he himself who wrote back, with a typewritten letter.
He had written something terse to the effect of, “You have a point. This is very interesting. We will publish this.” I think I may even have spoken to him by phone. At the time, we weren’t so elaborate in our professionalization. Quite otherwise. It was quite exciting to get an honest letter back, from Carroll Terrell directly. So those were a few of the moments of mentorship. Often there was very little about it that was formal or formalized.”
Reading what she’s shared, I can’t help but think that she correctly took all of the most important lessons from those exchanges: that her work was meaningful, that she’d written a great essay, that she was skilled in the profession she’d chosen to pursue. Knowing just how much she’s accomplished in the years since, it’s not at all surprising to me that someone with that perspective would have gone on to flourish in her career.
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This post is 1 of 3 posts included in the March instalment of my “As [month] ends, I’m thinking about…” series. You can read the main post here.
Jana M. Perkins is a computational social scientist. An award-winning scholar, her research has been federally funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada since 2019. She is the founder of Women of Letters, a longform interview series celebrating women’s paths to professional success. Together with Miranda Dunham-Hickman, she is co-authoring a book that will be published by Routledge.
To learn more about Perkins and her latest work, visit jcontd.com or follow her on Bluesky.