Dr. Jakob Waterborg
Dr. Jakob Waterborg is an Emeritus College member and mentor for the Graduate Writing Initiative.
“My role has been the coordinator on the Emeritus College Board to bring students with mentorship requests in contact with appropriate emeriti as mentors,” he said. “As emeriti we offer our time to assist graduate students with various types of writing assignments. These can be class-based assignments like term papers, Masters’ or PhD dissertation writing, (re)writing papers for publication, etc.”
Jakob described one of his mentorship experiences working with a Conservatory master’s student.
“The student had a Chinese background and struggled with English, especially the use of idiomatically correct phrases, and with mixing up ‘of’, ‘for’, ‘from’, ‘to’, etc in a course term paper,” he said. “Another very good experience was proof-reading a very well developed journal publication manuscript by a student with an Arabic language background and a Chinese Ph.D. advisor. It really needed very little writing help. Despite that, it took us 2 meetings, face-to-face, before we ironed out my technical understanding of the paper and especially to discover which non-standard language use valid technical, specialist terms and which words were indeed incorrect for proper English use.”
Jakob discussed why writing skills are so important for graduate students.
“If a graduate student cannot write properly, his advisor cannot grade work properly because even if you understand complex concepts but cannot express them appropriately and specifically in words, you cannot get the grade that you could earn,” he said. “And the academic world is very skeptical: if you don’t write understandably, you will not get your thesis or dissertation accepted, you will not get published, and consequently, you will not have a career!”
He said the emeritus faculty in particular can offer graduate students a reflection on what is expected of their writing within their field.
“Not being the graduate advisor or mentor, with his/her own stake in the game, frees an emeritus faculty mentor up to provide an unbiased (and sometimes negative) assessment that is needed to reach the objective and true writing product,” he said. “Don’t expect hand-holding or re-writing all through the process: we don’t want to do the work for you but we’ll have time and interest to help you find the proper writing way.”
Dr. Waterborg’s primary advice for graduate students is to not wait until it is too late to ask for help with writing.
“Asking for help in writing when you start too late, too close to the deadline or the end of the semester, does not allow for time to meet, to read, to (re-)assess and the re-write,” he said.