Staying Connected Posted on January 28, 2008 Margaret Beale Spencer (bio) observes that engaging in communities offers personal support and professional opportunity.

I think it's really important to reassure students they should celebrate their entire sense of self, their entire being, which means that you don't have to be sitting in your office in an academic building to be engaged in your work. That you need to go out and make connections in the community so you have multiple sources of support, and believe it or not you get ideas in the darnedest places, and I think it's really important. So emotionally it's really helpful to you as an individual, but also allows you to remain connected. And this is really important because I think you never know where you're going to end up.

You can call someone that you only see at meetings, at biannual meetings every two years, but you can call and say, “I'm having this experience” or “You're having good mentoring support, how might I handle this situation given I don't have any primary advice that's available from my department or my school or my university, given what I'm doing?”

And so in that way, you can access information from a variety of sources, but also be in touch with your community. And they bring interesting perspectives, and you'd be surprised what you learn. I value those experiences so much because part of what we do in our Institute is that we use the data that we generate in the Center.

And then we take the data to these collaborators, either we're analyzing data that they make available or data that we already have, and we either retrain staff or we have their staff to let us know what are some of the themes and issues we're dealing with. And we use our science to help them be more effective, and you learn, you get ideas from those cross-fertilizing experiences.

So I think even if you're in an isolated-appearing situation, it's not that necessarily, so you need to step out of the confines of those buildings and really engage life because human development is happening in these other contexts. So you'd be surprised about the ideas that you come across and that are helpful to you. And also resources, people can be very helpful to you so you don't feel so isolated.

So what I'm saying is that use the multiple contexts that you navigate every day, but you don't always view as a source of support because it's not part of the academy. But there are resources to be had and supports to be in a sense taken advantage of.

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