Teaching the Teachers
It’s a trend across the nation’s campuses: large numbers of faculty are heading into the twilight years of their academic careers. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, “While the national population is aging as a whole, factors specific to academe magnify the trend. . . Many professors hired during the great expansion of academe in the 1960s and 70s are now reaching their golden years.”
Michigan Tech is no exception, and the elder faculty, including some not near retirement, are giving their junior colleagues more than their years of accumulated knowledge. They’re helping them, in many different ways, prepare for their careers as they help our students create the future. Following are three distinctive Michigan Tech mentor/mentee relationships.
The Mechanics of the Academic Life
By Marcia Goodrich
Gordon Parker, left, and Jason Blough
If you’re the new kid, it’s good to have someone show you the ropes. That truth never changes, even in academia.
“It’s increasingly competitive these days for new assistant professors,” said William Predebon, chair of the mechanical engineering-engineering mechanics department. “So it’s very important for them to have a mentor who’s established and successful.”
Success is measured by papers published, grants received, and graduate students advised; by service on committees; and by quality teaching. It can be dizzying for a brand new hire whose main concern had been finishing a PhD dissertation.
Gordon Parker, John and Cathi Drake Professor and twelve-year veteran of the ME-EM department, has been shepherding Assistant Professor Jason Blough through this process; if all goes well, Blough will be tenured in the next year or two.
“It’s been a pretty good fit,” says Parker.
That’s partly because Parker and Blough are the same but different. A committee of two, they accomplish far more together than they would separately.
“Our technical areas are close enough to collaborate and different enough so we both add to the project,” Blough says. “We brainstorm all the time.”
Now, they are working on a system to track and control the position of a payload being lowered by crane onto a pitching vessel. “I do measurements and signal processing, while Gordon is on the controls side,” Blough says.
“We also have similar work habits and very similar opinions about getting things done,” says Parker. “It’s more than just a technical collaboration. It’s also about personality and outlook.”
That project represents a fraction of what it means to be faculty, and achieving a balance is daunting. “There’s a lot of it,” Blough admitted. “Gordon has been a big help. It’s great bouncing ideas off him on where to spend my energy.”
What’s in it for the senior faculty? “When a new faculty member doesn’t succeed, we all feel bad,” Parker said. “I don’t know if it’s that small-town psyche or what, but we all wonder if we could have done something to help.”
That’s why a mentor is so important. “Everybody needs an advocate and a confidant,” Predebon said. “Everyone needs a friend.”
A Matter of Trust and Hard Work
By Jennifer Donovan
Rolf Peterson, left, and John Vucetich
In 1990, John Vucetich was a freshman at Michigan Tech, and Professor Rolf Peterson had already been heading a groundbreaking predator-prey study for nearly twenty years.
Today, they are faculty colleagues in the School of Forest Resources and Environmental Science (SFRES) and coresearchers on the longest-running predator-prey study ever—the wolves and moose of Isle Royale, which will celebrate its fiftieth birthday in 2008.
What happened in the interim is a classic case of mentoring.
Like all SFRES freshmen, Vucetich was assigned to work with a professor as an undergraduate technician. That professor was Peterson. Vucetich began by photocopying papers, but soon he graduated to real lab work—analyzing coyote scat.
“That coyote scat project was pivotal,” says Vucetich. “Rolf explained the goal: figuring out what the coyotes had been eating. He explained that most of the answers would be in the library. I didn’t even know how to use the library.”
But Vucetich learned quickly. “I recall being impressed that Rolf trusted that I could do the job without being guided step by step. Being trusted, I felt an obligation to live up to that trust.”
Peterson recalls being equally impressed with Vucetich’s ambition and determination. “He jumped right into the research in his freshman year, and he was obviously highly motivated and enthusiastic.”
Peterson was not Vucetich’s only mentor during those crucial years. Tom Waite, now at Ohio State, spent countless hours working with Vucetich to hone his writing skills. “I remember Tom and John going at it, word by word, well into the night: the only ones left in the building,” Peterson says.
Like any mentoring, the guidance Waite and Peterson gave was only as good as Vucetich’s willingness to put it into action. “A prospective mentee needs to be open to having a mentor, and the relationship requires a mutual level of respect that is deeper than one might expect,” says Vucetich.
Both scientists call mentoring a two-way street. Peterson learned from Vucetich “not to shy away from trying new things for fear of failure.” And, in addition to sharing the technical and strategic skills of a good research scientist, Peterson gave Vucetich a deeper lesson, one that the younger scientist says has become his life’s guiding principle.
“My greatest fortune in working with Rolf is observing his highly developed eudaimonia, the Greek philosophers’ concept of happiness as a state of well-being that arises from feeling and acting rightly, the quality of one’s work and life as a whole,” says Vucetich. “I only hope that I can transform his examples in ways that help me develop eudaimonia in my own life.”
Family Tradition
By Dennis Walikainen
Marika Seigel and Alan Brokaw
Alan Brokaw and Marika Seigel’s academic relationship crosses disciplinary boundaries and began long ago and close to home. Brokaw is a thirty-two year veteran of teaching marketing in the School of Business and Economics. Seigel is starting her third year of teaching rhetoric and technical communication in the humanities department, and we believe they are the first father-daughter tenure-track duo in the University’s history. (Seigel’s husband, Matt, is also an assistant professor in humanities.)
Seigel remembers sitting on the floor of one of her dad’s classes as a youngster. “I was pretending to stir soup,” she recalls. “Later I realized it was something called ‘college,’ where grown-ups went to school. I was impressed by that.”
The passion for education runs deep in the Brokaw family. Seigel and her brother, Tomas ’01,
are the sixth generation of college graduates, and Seigel anticipates that son, Indrek Alan, and daughter, Annika, will be the seventh.
“There was always an expectation by my parents to go to graduate school,” Brokaw adds, “and we passed that on to our children.” Seigel shifted from a less-than-promising career in acting. “I wasn’t very good.”
Instead, a future in education occurred to Seigel as an undergraduate: she first entertained thoughts of teaching English as a second language, then literary criticism, finally pursuing her current field at Penn State. “And, after all, mom [Marianne Brokaw ’85 MS RTC] taught rhetoric, too.”
Is there a challenge teaching humanities or business at a technological university? “The humanities aren’t always as visible,” Seigel says, “but there’s so much interdisciplinary work going on.” She’s currently working with colleagues in humanities and computer science, looking at case studies to teach the rhetorical considerations when communicating with project stakeholders as a technical communicator or as a software engineer. Brokaw and Seigel have considered collaborating on the rhetoric of risk.
And as for teaching business? “I came up here for a style of life,” Brokaw says. “The fact that there was a great university here was a bonus.” Besides, “it’s a great job,” Brokaw says and Seigel agrees. “I came here to teach in one of, if not the best, RTC programs in the nation. The location was a bonus for me.”
Brokaw plans to retire in a couple of years, but Seigel is looking toward the tenure process and eventually teaching Annika or Indrek, continuing the family tradition.