Mentoring from Afar

I'm excited to announce that I'll be formally mentoring a UROP student this academic year! UROP,  the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program at the University of Michigan, matches several hundred first- and second-year students, and transfer students, each year with scholars looking to mentor young research assistants. The program is designed to create opportunities for minoritized students and those from non-traditional backgrounds, "creat[ing] conditions for an equitable, inclusive, and supportive educational environment where every person feels valued and has an opportunity to add value." 

The project my student will be working on is entitled "Mapping Prehistoric New World Hunter-Gatherers," a collaboration between myself, fellow grad student Ian Beggen, and our advisor Dr. Raven Garvey. Initially envisioned as an exploration of potential biases and other variables which may skew identification of archaeological sites on the landscape, the project has expanded as the ongoing pandemic has restricted our individual enterprises. Now a multi-stage endeavor, we are using environmental predictors to model expected prehistoric hunter-gatherer distributions, and hope compare our results to the distribution of known sites across various regions of the Americas. My UROP student will play a key role here, collecting information about sites and their locations from both literature and SHPOs and other government sources. 


Having benefited immensely from graduate-student mentorship when I was an undergrad, I am honored and excited for the opportunity to pay it forward, and introduce a young person to the challenges and rewards of academic research. I also can't help remembering that until two years ago, when I met my current fieldwork collaborator Dr. Anna Guengerich (Eckerd College), every project director I had ever had was a man. Across seven years, six separate field projects and four lab projects, I saw women as lab technicians, field assistants, and graduate employees, but never at the head of a project. (Goldstein et al. 2018 provide some insights into potential causes of this trend.) So I'm particularly excited that my UROP student won't share that experience; she is entering a woman-run project, in a woman-dominated lab space. I'm sure I'll make more than my share of mistakes as a mentor, but if I can help her feel that she belongs in science, at the leading a project or anywhere she might choose, I'll consider that a job well done.

What I'm Reading
Goldstein, Lynne, Barbara J. Mills, Sarah Herr, et al., 2018
Why Do Fewer Women than Men Apply for Grants after Their Ph.D.s?, American Antiquity 83(3): 367–386.

Tallavaara, Miikka, Jussi T. Eronen, and Miska Luoto, 2018
Productivity, biodiversity, and pathogens influence the global hunter-gatherer population density. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115(6):1232–1237. DOI:10.1073/pnas.1715638115.​