Preparing Doctoral Students for Scholar Communities

One of the great barriers to success for junior faculty is their romanticized image of the professoriate as an occupation marked by individual expertise and self-sufficient scholarship. As doctoral students, we tend to see the Ph.D. process as preparation for that self-sufficient existence rather than training for socialization into a community of scholars. According to Robert Boice [2000], “naiveté about the socialization process of the professoriate” leads to “failures and miseries.” This paper builds on my experience as a doctoral student under Gary W. Dickson’s mentorship at the University of Minnesota to explore the importance of scholar communities and the need to train doctoral students to actively create, grow, and sustain such mutually-beneficial entities.