Fuqua School professor James Bettman and students | Megan Morr
James Bettman: Preparing Students for Careers
Fuqua professor says mentoring is a favorite role for him
Monday, April 24, 2006
Every April, the GraduateSchool honors three faculty members with a Dean's Award for Excellence in Mentoring. This year's winners are Lisa Campbell, James Bettman and Linda Orr. The award is intended to recognize the importance of mentoring at Duke and to promote discussion of what constitutes good mentoring. For more, click here .
Durham, N.C. -- If the graduate students James Bettman mentors had a motto, it might be inspired by a Marx Brothers song: “Hello, I Must Be Going.”
“Preparation for them to leave starts almost as soon as they come in,” said Bettman, who recently received a 2006 Dean’s Award for Excellence in Mentoring.
A nationally recognized expert in consumer behavior, Bettman is Burlington Industries Professor, having joined the Fuqua School of Business in 1982. In 1988, he received the Duke University Scholar/Teacher of the Year Award.
He has been the mentor for 25 students since he came to Duke, and he currently mentors another seven, all at different stages of their careers.
“Working with grad students is a constant source of renewal for me,” he said. “With each new batch, you think of all the great things that can happen. My job is to help that transpire.”
Bettman’s department is known for its low attrition rate of doctoral candidates.
“My philosophy is once we’ve admitted somebody, I’d like to try as hard as we can to make sure they complete,” he said.
His students appreciate the respect he shows them. Compulsive by nature, he is known for giving immediate feedback on chapter drafts and articles, often the same day the work is sent to him. He recognizes that some of his research is shaped by what his students are doing: About half of the papers he does are co-authored by former students.
“I try to treat [students] as junior colleagues right from the beginning, as opposed to worker bees,” he said.
To help his students succeed, Bettman encourages them to take risks. Rather than allowing students to pad their CVs with a number of papers that build incrementally on research done by others, he urges them to think of research questions that will have a real impact in the field.
“To build a really good career, you have to have something special,” he said. “That involves taking risks and doing studies you aren’t sure are going to work out.”
His mentoring talents show in the success of his students. Often, he looks at professional journals and notes that many of the associate editors and reviewers are former students.
“To me, what’s sacred is giving back to the discipline and making sure we have the next generation of scholars to carry on the work,” he said. “You feel like you are spawning the next generation, and it’s a lot quicker than real grandkids.”
