From: rosydemorest@gmail.com   
      
   Professor, demystify yourself   
      
    Working closely with brilliance and getting the hang of it By John Lurz '03   
   johnlurz Princeton.EDU Dry mouth, sweaty palms, and a racing heartbeat   
   accompanied me as I walked into my thesis adviser's office last week. It was   
   our first meeting. I had a    
   few rough ideas about a topic bouncing around in my head, but the sight of   
   Princeton University Professor of English D. Vance Smith immediately ejected   
   them from my mind like a pilot in a flight emergency. And it wasn't because   
   Professor Smith is an    
   intimidating figure. Far from it. He is a tall, reserved man who wears little   
   round glasses. His goatee, neatly trimmed, is delicately scattered with gray.   
   His gentle accent, though slight, reminds me he grew up in South Africa. No,   
   it wasn't his actual    
   appearance that emptied my mind, it was the need I felt to be as intelligent   
   and as much of an expert as I envisioned Professor Smith to be. That   
   afternoon, I imagined him as a draconian task master ready to impatiently   
   fling me out of his office for    
   lacking a definite and completely formulated — not to mention brilliant   
   — thesis topic. I imagined that an eminent and busy professor would not   
   take any more time than completely necessary to work with a babbling,   
   incoherent undergraduate.    
   Which was why his first question — "How was your summer?" —   
   immediately startled me into a rambling chain of prattle about summer days   
   spent hiking in New Hampshire. Did Professor Smith really care about my summer   
   or was he just being polite, I    
   wondered. When I finally remembered all the manners my parents taught me and   
   asked him about his summer, he responded with tales of teaching and traveling   
   with his family. All of a sudden, words like "my wife" and "vacation" were   
   coming out of his mouth.    
   Is Professor Smith a real person who has actual human relationships, I asked   
   myself? Does he actually lead a life outside of being an articulate and   
   accomplished Medievalist lecturing on Chaucer? Is he also a husband, friend   
   and colleague who interacts    
   with people the way my friends and I do? As we talked, I began to realize the   
   pigeonhole I'd put Professor Smith into was quite a narrow and limited view of   
   him. We continued chatting, talking about the classes I was taking and the   
   ones he was teaching,    
   about my plans for next year, and about a friend of mine who is a former   
   advisee of his. I suddenly felt the need to stop "wasting" his time and get to   
   the point of the meeting. I thought that he must have more important things to   
   do: maybe work on his    
   own writing or prepare a lecture for the next day. I began, almost in spite of   
   myself, to repeat the rehearsed lines about the relationship between memory   
   and writing that I hoped I could develop into a viable thesis topic for my   
   English degree. I'd    
   written my junior paper on a theory of the novel in which memory played a   
   crucial role and wanted to expand a bit on that. The way writing aids or harms   
   the faculty of memory had interested me since I began aspiring to write my own   
   fiction. When    
   Professor Smith began asking me questions about my ideas, I felt threatened   
   — did he not think they were smart ideas? Had I ruined my chance for   
   impressing him? How could I salvage something of this meeting? I began to   
   sweat more, and my heartbeat    
   surged as I tried to think about his questions and respond with intelligent   
   answers. Was I saying the right thing, I wondered? What did he think? Was he   
   going to send me out of his office with a look of disdain and contempt? And as   
   I responded to his    
   questions and he responded to my answers with comments or more questions, I   
   grew used to the dialectic, falling easily into the Socratic method. Teasing   
   relevant ideas from my garbled words, Professor Smith formulated and repeated   
   back to me in a more    
   coherent and clear style what I had blathered to him. After a few minutes, we   
   had a viable beginning point for a topic, were assembling a reading list, and   
   we were both excited about the prospect of the work ahead. The idea had been   
   mine from the start,    
   but I just needed the help of Professor Smith to focus it into something about   
   which I could write 80+ pages. He told me to email him sometime in the coming   
   week and we could set up another appointment. He told me, though, that I   
   shouldn't hesitate to    
   hound him for appointments and attention, admitting that he could be a bit   
   absent-minded. At that moment I realized that professors are people too.   
   Professor Smith — as well as every other professor on our campus —   
   have real feelings, real    
   relationships, and don't just exist as talking heads in front of a group of   
   cowering undergrads. They aren't perfect; they have doubts; they aren't always   
   sure of things. And sometimes they forget about their advisees. It was   
   undoubtedly an immature    
   viewpoint that I held of my adviser that probably hints at my own insecurities   
   and self-confidence issues more than I'd like to acknowledge. Yet, from what   
   I've heard from talking with my friends, I'm not the only one who thinks this   
   way. It's not our    
   job, though, to be perfect, brilliant academics; we're supposed to flounder   
   around with ideas, and professors are supposed to help us. Professors enjoy   
   taking time to work with students. If you've ever taught anything, you know   
   the satisfaction that    
   comes from that look of comprehension or from watching someone accomplish a   
   goal you've helped them to achieve. It's important to remember that someone   
   helped these professors to get where they are and that many times they are   
   learning as much from you    
   as you are from them. One day — be it tomorrow or further in the future,   
   whether it be in academia, business, or any other field — you'll be   
   helping and teaching someone too.   
      
      
      
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