心理专业学生如何才能做好学问？第三部分8

sos862004

Who was your mentor, how do you pursue your own mentoring role, and what are some of the issues that arise in pursuing that role?

Robert Sternberg.
My mentor was Gordon Bower at Stanford, who is a very successful psychologist. Any time I compare myself to him, I feel like a failure. I look at what he did at a given age, and I say, well, I have not done anything like that. So I do not think that is a particularly good way to go. What I have come to realize is that that is a maladaptive tendency on my part. What was great about him as a mentor is he showed what you can do being him. (The lesson is not to be him, it is to find as much myself and to become as much who I am as he found himself and became who he is. )

So what I try to do for my own students is not to turn them into junior Sternbergs—I would look at that as a flaw—but rather to help them find who they are—what is their niche? What kinds of issues excite them? What kinds of methods work for them? What kinds of problems are interesting to them?—and to help them find their niche, whether it is academic or nonacademic, or methodology, or whatever. The important thing for an advisor is to let go of turning your students into junior versions of you, and the important thing for a student to let go of is trying to be a junior version of your advisor. Instead, what you should do is get the best you can from your advisor and other people on the faculty, stir it all in the pot, add your own thing, and then figure out uniquely who you are, what your strengths are, and how to make the most of that. I think that you will find that the psychologists who are really successful in any sense, including by their own standards, are not the ones who follow any one formula. They are the people who figured out who they are and how to make the most of that. My undergraduate mentor, Endel Tulving, was also wonderful. He taught me that when almost everyone assumes something is true or right, it very likely isn’t.

Shelley Taylor.
I did not have a mentor. I worked with several people in graduate school. The person who was the obvious choice for me to be a mentor moved to Michigan when I was in my second year of graduate school. When it came time to pick a dissertation topic, I knew what I wanted to do. So instead of going into one of the areas that remained, I picked somebody who was really smart and who I knew would leave me alone—completely. So mentoring was not something I had a very good model for when I started doing it.

I think that over the years I have learned how to be a good mentor and that a lot of that is letting people find their own way but giving them a good shove from time to time. I try to be really direct in the feedback I give. A lot of times people soften and blunt their feedback in a way that will make it acceptable, and I do not think that is very useful. I try to be really direct in what I think but not move anybody away from the path they want to pursue.
Another good thing a mentor can do is try to figure out the particular strengths that graduate students have. One of the very interesting things, as you all know, is that by the time you get to graduate school, everybody is smart, and you can spend a lot of time trying to figure out who is the smartest, but it is really stupid to do that. Instead, if people derail, it is usually because they have some kind of flaw, like they are procrastinators (拖拉者)or they cannot sit down and write. What a good mentor does is to try and identify what that potential flaw or problem is likely to be and then work with that particular student on that particular problem, but otherwise just to nudge them along the road they would choose on their own.

Martin Seligman.
I know that this is the first time all three of us are going to say the same thing; therefore, I believe what we are saying has a lot of truth in it. It is that mentorship is not what it is cracked up to be; a good mentor basically leaves you alone. My advisor in graduate school was Dick Solomon, and Dick probably has the track record of turning out more creative and important psychologists than anyone else of his generation. Dick did what Bob and Shelley both said you should do, to explicitly be a cheerleader for you, to get grant funds for you, and then to leave you alone. I think the reason for this, and why Bob and Shelley are right about mentorship and the importance of its absence, is contempt, contempt for the past. Good science is, by and large, courageous science. It is unpopular science. It is science that no one did before and thought should not be done. In fact, one of the things that I was thinking about when Fred asked about how APA should be changed and the future of psychology was that we need mechanisms to nurture unpopular science and to teach people that courage is part and parcel of good science. The second ingredient for success as a psychologist, contempt, is wrapped up with the absence of serious mentorship.

irismaple

你当时的导师是谁？当你自己做导师时，怎样把握好这个角色，遇到过什么问题？

罗伯特•斯腾伯格（Robert Sternberg）
我的导师是斯坦福大学的戈登.鲍尔（Gordon Bower），他是非常有名的心理学家。每次我拿他和自己比较，都觉得自己是个失败者。回顾他所取得的成绩，不管在他的任何年纪，我都无法与其比拟。所以，这样比较，毫无意义。我现在已经意识到，这种比较是一种不良倾向。他作为一名导师的伟大之处在于，身体力行。（不是去效仿他，而是尽量多挖掘自己，尽力而为做好自己。）

当我有了自己的学生之后，我所做的并非让他们成为年轻时候的我――这将是非常糟糕的――而是帮助他们找到自己――找到他们的定位。他们适合的方式是什么？他们对什么样的问题感兴趣？不管是在专业还是非专业领域或方法.论上，帮他们找到自己的定位。作为一名导师/指导者，千万不要按照你自己的模子去培养学生；学生也不要模仿老师。你应该从你的导师或其他老师那里学到该学的，融入你自己的东西，然后造就一个独一无二的你，看清自己的长处，并详加利用。你会发现，在各方面成功的心理学家们，他们都有自己独特之处，而不是效仿别人。他们清楚地知道自己的优缺点。我本科时候的导师Endel Tulving也很优秀，他对我说大多数人认为对的事情，不一定对；大多数人认为错的事，也不一定错。

谢莉.泰勒（Shelley Taylor）
我没有导师。在读研究生期间，我与几个同学一起学习。读研二时，我的准导师去了密歇根。论文选题时，我选了一位非常聪明的人，而且我认为他能完全放手让我自***由发挥。因此，在做论文方面，我并没有受到很多指导。

这些年来，我认识到做一名好导师的要点在于：让学生找适合自己的路，但随时推他们一把。在解答问题时，我通常很直白。很多时候，人们在回答问题时会比较柔和，便于对方接受，我则不以为然。在任何方面，我都很直白，但不勉强学生背离其兴趣发展。

另外，作为导师应该对研究生们的特长了然于胸。例如，毕业生们都很优秀，而作为导师费时费力地搞评比，看谁是最优秀的，这种做法确实很愚蠢。如果有的学生排名靠后，通常是由于他们自身的缺点，比如说有些人做事比较拖拉，或者耐不下性子安心写作等等。此时，好的导师要做的是帮其找出缺点和问题所在，并和学生们一起解决问题，而不仅仅是催促他们。

马丁.塞利格（Martin Seligman）
我们三人对同一话题发言，这可是头一次；相信我们所说的肯定有许多可取之处。“导师”并不是吹捧之词，好的导师通常让学生自***由发挥。我的研究生导师是迪克.所罗门（Dick Solomon），迪克是同时代最具创新和最重要的心理学家之一。好的导师应该如何做，刚才两位所提到的，迪克都做到了，对学生来说，迪克就是好的拉拉队队长，为你申请助学金，由你自己做学问。我认为“导师缺席”的深层意义就是我们不迷信权威（对过去的蔑视）。总的来说，好科学是勇敢的，是不迎合潮流的，是前无古人的也是敢于说不的。佛瑞德问我美国心理学家协会（APA）该如何变革，心理学该往哪发展？我觉得我们需要一种机制来培养非流行学科，要让人们意识到勇气是科学不可或缺的一部分。对于心理学家来说，成功的第二个组成部分是不迷信权威，而这一点则体现在：导师不必对学生进行严肃指导。

[ 本帖最后由 irismaple 于 2008-8-6 17:33 编辑 ]