One Among Us: Helping Hand

“Only when you do a PhD, you get paid for doing something you enjoy doing and you also get a degree at the end.” This is the philosophy with which I work, trying to give each student the time they need, helping them to work at their own pace. I am happy to work overnight to comment on a manuscript from a workaholic student, to allow the highly self-critical and thorough student to take months for one analysis, to discuss science and gossip with a student who is like family, to be a little formal with a student who likes to keep a distance or to wake up in the middle of the night to receive a call from student who is going through a panic attack. After all, it takes all kinds of flavours to make a dish savoury!

This is a collaborative writing endeavour by a group of students and the teacher of the Sociology of Gender course (2021), department of Sociology, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad. The student authors are listed alphabetically, followed at the end by the teacher.

It is more important to ask “why and how” rather than being content with “what”. But, unfortunately, we Indians are generally obsessed with “what”. The challenge of a teacher/mentor is to ignite bright minds; to stimulate them. A mentor must be kind, considerate, observant, thoughtful, and after all, enthusiastically responsive.

Science in general and mathematics in particular is for creative thinkers. One must give total freedom to researchers to choose his or her area of research. Science, including mathematics, has always produced and will continue to produce useful work if the creative thinkers are given complete freedom.

The social worlds of mentor and mentee structure the power via so-called modernized educational institutions. The traditional knowledge system was also based on the power and hierarchy of caste. Though public educational institutions are valorized for its power to overcome caste-based conflict and education (Beteille 2006:174), the contradicting forms of powers related to caste and education function in two ways.

The problems in mentor-mentee relationship in our society has been discussed from an experience based approach. Mentors should become special friends to the mentees and might eventually rise to the level of friend, philosopher and guide. However, all seeds do not make big trees. So, a friend plus position for the period of cooperation is good enough. Mentor and mentees may be close in age like classmates or they may have age gap of one or two generations. Mentees like to see mentors to be slightly advanced co-thinker of the problems faced by them.

The key to success is for the mentor to be extremely generous to ensure that the mentee has all the support (s)he needs for his/her research. This includes ensuring a hassle-free research environment, administrative support and access to resources (including papers, talks and visits to conferences). Given the uncertainties in research, it is important that the mentee is guaranteed such support during his/her first few years.

I abhor the practice in which a guide is assigned to a student immediately on entering the graduate school and the guide looses no time in proposing a problem – something that unfortunately happens all too often in our universities.

A mentor-mentee relationship is a crucial one in the professional lives of both the persons. It has to be handled with utmost care and sensitivity.

This article discusses the problems that persons with physical and cognitive challenges confront on account of exclusivist attitudes in academic institutions.  It focuses in particular on the classroom situation and attempts to bring to the fore how unpreparedness of teachers and students, the absence of adaptive teaching curriculum and teaching techniques, the absence of empathy and active listening, the unavailability of access to adequate learning material can lead to alienation of the students with physical and cognitive difference which ultimately leads to their complete withdrawal.

Mentoring carries the responsibility of enabling someone to move out of debilitating circumstances; it is much more than the term that has emerged as a catchphrase in an NGO-ized women’s studies discourse—“capacity building.”