Mentoring

The SAWH is committed to mentorship and professional support and is pleased to offer this Mentoring and Professional Development Toolkit for its members and friends. We have selected a range of topics of interest to graduate students, young professionals, and even veteran historians. For topics that are particularly rich or complex, such as minority faculty experiences and job searching, we have included multiple entries to reflect different perspectives. We hope to phase in new topics over time and welcome suggestions and feedback, which can be sent to the chair of the Professional Development Committee. The SAWH is indebted to our contributors and past Toolkit editor Antoinette van Zelm.

In 2020 the Professional Development Committee began hosting a series of Zoom sessions in order to add to and update the existing toolkit. The topics of these discussion sessions vary from making the most of your graduate school experience, to presenting your research at conferences, preparing your work for publication, career possibilities and preparation, and a score of other helpful topics. Recordings of these sessions are linked below. Please contact the Committee Chair if you’ve got a topic idea and please contact the SAWH secretary at Secretary@thesawh.org for the password for the recordings.

Conferences: Suggestions on conference presentations, networking, and organizing.

Finance and Funding: Fellowships, grants and other funding opportunities.

General: General advice on history and the academy.

Graduate Students: Advice for surviving graduate school.

Life: Strategies for the rest of your life.

Mentors and Mentoring: How to find, and keep, a mentor or mentee.

Professional Development: Career advice, the job market, and publishing.

Teaching: Skills and techniques for teaching.