Graduate training under a great mentor transforms one irreversibly, like formative years abroad.

Evidence

I do not think it is a huge stretch to compare living in Paris with being Marilynn Brewer’s graduate student. If you take some time to ponder what it would be like to live in one of the world’s most beautiful and cultured cities and what it would be like to have several years sharing the same laboratory, classroom, and intellectual space with one of the foremost social psychologists in the history of the field, the two experiences actually have a lot in common. Both experiences are intense, for one. Challenging and stimulating, absolutely. But for those of us who had the unique good fortune to be among Marilynn’s professional offspring, learning how to become a social psychologist under her tutelage was truly nothing less than a transformational experience; it was something that shaped you irrevocably and became part of you for years to come, probably something like Hemingway’s halcyon years in Paris in the 1920s, where he learned to eat and drink, live and write, love and fight, suffer and create—probably something akin to a movable feast. — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 2215

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘transformational cross-cultural’ mentorship framing connects directly to the book’s own theme, also echoing how Jane Eyre’s schooling or A Visit From the Goon Squad’s mentor-figures reshape identity.
• SHARE: A social-psychology colleague would appreciate the extended Hemingway-as-PhD-advisor analogy about Brewer’s lab.