Congratulating the 2026 SSD Recipients for Excellence in MA Advising and Mentoring

This year’s Awards for Excellence in MA Advising and Mentoring recognize professors celebrated for their generosity, encouragement, patience, and support. Nominated by students currently in MA programs, the awards recognize outstanding mentorship to students in the Division of the Social Sciences. In their nomination forms, students recognized their advisors’ commitment not only to meet their degree requirements, but also for enhancing the quality of their overall experience.

Adom Getachew, Professor of Race, Diaspora & Indigeneity and Political Science

Professor Getachew has been an MA advisor for 10 years, and she thinks a lot about who — or what — is the best fit for a student. Depending on their area of interest, she might suggest the student speak with a few of her colleagues or point them to particular texts.

“The way you learn is you take your input from different perspectives and orientations,” Getachew says. “I have mentors for different parts of my professional and intellectual life. I have benefited from having a world of people that I can speak to about different facets of my work, and I want students to also have that opportunity. My hope is to show them that advising is not a one-stop shop; it's really about building a community of interlocutors for yourself.”

Among her nominating notes was an appreciation for the connections that Getachew makes for mentees, citing her broad knowledge of books and articles, as well as an understanding of which faculty members would make excellent contacts.

In addition to her role as an advisor and professor, Getachew is the chair of the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity, and she’s working on her second book, focused on the intellectual origins and political practices of Garveyism. Because of her own demanding schedule — and with respect for students’ coursework and jobs — Getatchew is careful to set expectations from the outset. She creates meeting schedules with students so they can prioritize their work together, with writing and feedback deadlines. And through experience, she knows the importance of kindness in the mentor-student relationship.

“There was always a generosity and a sense of possibility,” she says of her mentors. “It’s being constructive and patient about giving feedback, and showing them paths of improvement. That's something that people did for me. I'm not the scholar I am now because I was born into this role. It was from a lot of people making a lot of effort. [I try to] remember that about myself, remember those moments of care and kindness.”

Getachew is paying that generosity forward, and even offered to use her own funds to help cover a student’s travel costs to a conference. “She understood how important a conference experience was for a budding scholar, and she was prepared to make sure I got to go,” the student wrote.

David A. Peterson, Assistant Instructional Professor in the Masters in Computational Social Science program.

“What I don't want students to learn is, ‘Here is David's recipe for writing a good research paper,’” Professor Peterson says. Rather, he sees himself as a guide in helping students learn their own processes and their standards for success. “It's not about giving them directions. It’s about giving them the tools to find the answer for themselves, because then they have ownership over it, then it's their project. It's not my project that they executed.”

As a nominating student wrote, Peterson’s mentorship helped them become a more careful researcher, a clearer writer, and a more independent thinker. He treats mentorship, they wrote, as both intellectual training and professional development. 

For example, Peterson emphasizes the importance of audience: No matter a student’s eventual profession or field, he explains, they’ll need to communicate effectively. “I see that as both professional development and inseparable from doing good research,” he says. “Good research is good to the extent that it contributes to society's stock of knowledge, and you can only do that if it is taken up by the audience that you intend for it to be taken up by.”

To help students better tackle their projects, Peterson asks them to describe how their research topic currently functions in society. Has it always worked that way? Does it have scope conditions? He encourages students to tell the story of their concept — its mechanisms — before diving into research or methodology, as it establishes a concrete base that can keep ideas from scattering. It was an approach he learned from his own mentor at Ohio State University. 

Peterson urges students to be open to the idea that there are multiple ways that a research question can be answered, and many ways that a paper could be written. “It’s having the intellectual humility to say, ‘I do not know everything,’” he says. “I can learn something from anybody. I learn from my students' projects all the time, and being open to that and being open to them having better ideas than me is really good.”

Peterson likens it to teaching a course: Each time you present the information, your understanding of it changes a little bit. With advising, he says, students often show him a new approach or application of a method that he hadn’t considered before. “It's made me a better teacher and a better researcher.”

Kara Ann Hooser, Assistant Instructional Professor in the Committee on International Relations

Hooser has taken extra care — and extra time — to guide her students. “She consistently pours her best into her students and shows up in meaningful ways when we most need guidance, reassurance, or support through moments of self-doubt and imposter syndrome,” one student wrote.

As Hooser tells it, her patience and willingness to show up comes from remembering what it feels like to learn something for the first time. And while she, too, is busy, she reminds herself that students are often struggling because they're overwhelmed: They’re afraid of getting things wrong, or they’re trying to balance school with work, family, or living away from home. Her goal, she says, is to meet their effort with the same level of care and commitment.

“One of my favorite parts of advising is getting to watch an idea take shape over the course of a year, and it's hard not to be excited as those ideas develop,” Hooser says. “I also think those small moments, showing students you were thinking of their work, really matter. Graduate research can feel super isolating, and students often spend a lot of time wondering whether anyone besides them finds their project interesting. It’s important for them to know someone else is excited about their ideas.”

Nominating students highlighted Hooser’s ability to encourage them to use their own voices — “Her mentorship gave many of us the confidence to trust our ideas, sharpen our arguments, and take our own intellectual voices seriously,” one wrote — and she emphasizes that she wants students to build confidence in their own thinking. The most interesting questions, she says, are usually the ones they genuinely care about.

“As a first-generation college student myself, I also know what it feels like to wonder whether you belong in academia,” Hooser says. “I remember feeling like everyone else had been handed a playbook that I somehow missed. That experience has definitely shaped how I advise. I try to make the hidden parts of academia a little less hidden, especially because that ‘hidden curriculum’ is often what determines whether students enjoy research or end up feeling overwhelmed by it. I also want students to know that their perspectives are valuable. If I can help students trust themselves a little more by the end of the year, I feel like I've done my job.”

Hooser says mentoring is one of the most rewarding and meaningful parts of her job. Students have introduced her to new ways of thinking, and it often energizes her. “Advising reminds me why I fell in love with academia in the first place.”