rachelhills:
Previously: It’s mentoring week here at Musings of An Inappropriate Woman.
Broadly speaking, there are three types of mentors:
1. The Mentor-Mentor. Someone you like/admire who has knowledge or experience you currently don’t have but would like to have some day. You converse from time to…
I’ve a mentor who straddles 1 and 3 with great ease: Prof William MacNeil of the Griffith Law School at Griffith University. William has been a great friend, PhD supervisor, and colleague, and continues to take an interest in my career progression even though I rarely feel like I have little to give in return except for earnest philosophical discussion.
It has taken me a few years, but I’m finally coming around to William’s advice to go off and do a law degree: a juris doctor. My work in psychoanalytic philosophy over the past few years has tended more and more towards issues of the law, culture, and society nexus. But, and this is a HUGE “but” in academic bureaucracies, I don’t have a law degree. Thus trying to get a job in my current research interest area is counter-acted by the absent checked box… a god damned checked box! Kafka would be ironically amused by my interest in checking said box.
So while William continues to support me and fill my head with beautiful futures of employment where a Doctor of philosophy/legal theory/jurisprudence can create rainbows of intellectual capital from the tears of theory, I’m off to slug through a JD 2012-15.
Here’s to mentors and the weird things they encourage you to do. *clink*
