UROP Research Mentor Project Submission Portal: Submission #986

Mentoring Philosophy My approach to mentoring undergraduate researchers is to allow students to create low-stakes but high-reward opportunities to do original research. This means that I encourage students to start with large collections of original sources that speak to broad topics, and then to create answerable questions as the evidence allows. So rather than looking for needles in haystacks and run the risk of facing failure, I encourage students to study the haystacks and then to pay special attention when they stumble across an intellectual needle or anything else that looks compelling.

I take this approach because all historical research (or research in general) carries a risk that a trip to an archive will yield no relevant documents or a stack of documents that do not speak directly to our most pressing questions. So I encourage students to have open-ended questions, to follow the sources to better questions, and to learn to continue asking new questions throughout the project. I am also a mentor who pays attention to students but does not hover at every moment. I believe that scholars need intellectual space to make their own discoveries and then they need guidance to grapple with what they have learned. As a result, I help lead students to their initial sources and let them be creative and apply their own skills and knowledge to address important historical questions. As a result, I learn from their research even as I am providing some of the instruction.