Help from the blogosphere

Saw this post on BlogHer, which I don't often read (but very occasionally look at the education blogroll), but caught this one because of the reference to Bitch PhD. Post is about a talk given at Emory about mentoring grad students. [conference on education was going on at same time...I thought about trying to submit for this one or go to it at some point...may do so someday-- Educause. ]

I really like this part discussing something that many grad students undoubtedly feel at some time, I know I sure as hell have... "imposter syndrome".

One such issue is impostor
syndrome, where, in a grad school context, you feel as if you don't
really belong where you are, that you're a fraud and everyone will eventually
find out. You're not intelligent enough, you haven't read enough, you don't work
as hard as everyone else--and when you do work
hard, you feel as if your labor gets you nowhere.

Wow. Well, that pretty much sums up a whole lot of complaining, venting, angsting, whining and banging my head against a wall for the past 18 months...literally, figuratively and "blog-ily".

Why can't Metro U or my dept have some of these mentoring tools and tips as mentioned in the Bitch PhD talk, or one the many websites out there for helping grad students? Like this one from U of North TX for Sociology students, or this one from Inside Higher Ed [didn't I blog about this earlier???] ? this site has a long article on mentoring (in a very poorly designed website. ugh. and I have serious concerns about its credibility despite its good intentions because I have no idea who this org is... ahh, an information literacy and web credibility problem within my own little posting...great!) From a more credible site (About.com-- commercial yes, but fairly reliable and credible) there's an article as part of a series on grad studies and relationships with faculty. From the west there's this set of resources from U Washington, including a link to 'helping prepare future faculty'.

I'm not the only one out in the blogosphere looking for help, railing at their university to do more, do something more concrete and logical. Love this quote, "Signing progress reports does not a mentor make. " HA! Hello, Metro U?? Are you listening??!

This started as me wanting to link out to others in the academic blogosphere who are helping others, and to take some of that energy out there and channel it. I don't have a whole lot to offer back in terms of mentoring, but I'll work on it for later.