Intercampus Mentorship Program: One Participant's Success Story

A few weeks ago, in a post about the Rackham-CRLT Intercampus Mentorship Program, we promised to share stories from some of the program's former participants. This guest post from Sarah Gerk tells what an amazing professional development opportunity the program can be. For more details about the program--open to any U-M graduate student or postdoc--see this page. 

It was only about a year ago now that I nervously sent an email to Charles McGuire, Professor of Musicology at Oberlin College, to ask if he would be interested in becoming my mentor. Little did I know then that the relationship initiated with that email would become one of the most helpful of my career--not only because it provided me invaluable experience with and advice about teaching, but also because I was lucky enough to get an amazing job out of it.

I chose Oberlin for my mentorship experience because of its unique combination of a small liberal arts school and music conservatory. Having attended large public schools my entire life, I wanted to explore different models before entering the job market. My mentorship involved a series of monthly visits to the Oberlin campus. I guest lectured in classes, spoke with faculty members about their teaching, and got to know a few students who were thinking about pursuing musicology in graduate school. From the beginning, Charles McGuire was a generous, kind, and valuable mentor. We spent hours hashing out the finer points of my teaching philosophy, debating the possibilities of large lectures versus small discussions, and discussing the benefits of Oberlin’s model of higher education.
 
I also encountered situations involving students that helped me realize a bit more of my own potential as a teacher. The first guest lecture, in the only large lecture course at the conservatory, was nothing short of scary. It’s a real challenge to walk into a classroom that is not your own and speak in front of 200 bright students who have already settled into their own rhythms for the semester. But it is also what we must do in the final stages of the job application process. With Charles McGuire’s help, I put together a lecture and put myself out there, literally, on the stage of the classroom. It wasn’t entirely comfortable, and in my eternal perfectionism, I felt like there was much to improve. In the process, however, I learned perhaps the most valuable lesson of all: that I really could do a job like this.
 
The end of my story is that, a few months into my mentorship, Oberlin invited me to apply for a job and I am now teaching that large lecture class. I am now doing that job. In a very real and direct way, this mentorship helped me to get where I wanted to go. While not every mentorship experience ends quite so brilliantly as mine, the Rackham-CRLT mentorship program is a unique and extremely valuable opportunity afforded to UM students to jump into something new: to see how another institution operates, forge a new connection with a scholar in your field, and put yourself in a position to accept new, and potentially life-changing, opportunities.
 
Sarah Gerk is Visiting Teacher of Musicology at Oberlin College. She is ABD in historical musicology at U-M.
Submitted by tbraun on Mon, 12/03/2012 - 9:50am
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