If you read our FiSch homepage, you’ll see that Faith-in-Scholarship is all about “Dynamic Christian thinking in the university and beyond”. Within that, there is a particular focus on supporting postgraduate students. Today we have an announcement about one aspect of that.
One way in which Christian postgraduates can grow as Christian scholars and thinkers is through local groups. These provide an excellent opportunity for people to work through what it means to follow Jesus as a postgraduate student.
But, as well as learning from your peers, it is also important to learn from more experienced Christian scholars. This can happen in those local groups. For example, you could invite lecturers to give talks or to share their testimonies, or you could read articles and books by Christian thinkers. But this will only get you so far; to really benefit from their wisdom requires more focused, long-term, one-to-one support: mentoring.
Now, probably the best way for this to happen is if your supervisor is just such an experienced Christian scholar. That is, not just a scholar who happens to be a Christian, but someone who has thought long and hard about how to approach and understand your discipline in a faithfully Christian way. But most Christian postgraduates do not find themselves in this position.
So what other possibilities are there? How can Christian postgraduates find a mentor?
This is something we’ve been working on. We’ve been laying some foundations, and making contacts, so that we now have potential mentors lined up in most subjects. We’d now like to link those mentors with potential mentees. Would you be interested? Why not get in touch and see if we can make some connections?
We don’t have a rigid pre-defined plan for what this mentoring will look like. It could be as simple as being introduced to each other, and then having someone you can email with questions every so often. Or it could involve meeting face-to-face, or chatting via Skype every couple of months. We’d love to hear your thoughts!
- From the observatory to the pulpit - August 30, 2016
- Whole-life hope - July 11, 2016
- The Whole of (Academic) Life for Christ - April 25, 2016
