News — Dr. John Anderson, W.H. Drury Professor of Ecology and Natural History at College of the Atlantic (COA) in Bar Harbor, ME, has been selected as the 2024 Council on Undergraduate Research – Goldwater Scholars Faculty Mentor Awardee. The award gifts $5,000 for the awardee’s undergraduate research program.
Dr. Anderson attributes his career to his mentors and good fortune. As he sees it, he wasn’t an exceptional student, but with luck, he was taken under the wings of mentors who listened to and valued him, saw his potential, and guided him when he most needed it. These formative experiences shaped his philosophy of teaching and mentoring.
Although humble about calling himself a mentor, Dr. Anderson has indeed mentored many successful students and Goldwater Scholars throughout his career. “Listening,” Dr. Anderson said, is critical. Of the more than 100 students he has mentored and listened to, 16 have been recognized by the Goldwater Scholarship Foundation, while many more have gone on to pursue careers in research, academic administration, and public policy.
“I am enormously touched and grateful to receive the award, but honestly I feel that in reality it goes to the amazing students—both past Goldwater awardees and oh so many others—who I have been privileged to work with over these many years,” Dr. Anderson said. “I have been so very lucky that these remarkable young people saw something in what I had to offer and for a brief time allowed me to call myself their teacher.”
According to his students, Dr. Anderson is a committed mentor who inspires excellence, diligence, and confidence. With his experiential approaches in the field and continued listening from start to finish, Dr. Anderson gives all he has to his students, reminding himself that he is not the “main event”— they are. He inspires them to learn from their mistakes and helps them gain the knowledge and confidence to overcome all that is put in their path.
“The CUR-Goldwater Scholars Faculty Mentor Award needed to be created to enable our community to recognize exceptional mentors like John Anderson,” said John Mateja, President of the Goldwater Scholarship Foundation. “John’s mentoring is not about John or his research, it is about helping his students find their passions and career interests.”
Dr. Anderson’s Goldwater nominees, students like Nicole Cabana ’99, the current deputy director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Woods Hole Lab and a Knauss Fellow, have been bright and dedicated, he said. Students who come early, stay late, ask for extra readings, and come to his office waiving a paper wanting to know why the editor missed an important point. He said he tries not to smile to show his glee as they talk.
“They’ve been willing to take chances, both in terms of intellect and in terms of surf, snow, rain, fog, desert sands, guano, and gull vomit, and somehow they kept their tempers, enhanced their curiosity, and maintained a sense of humor,” Dr. Anderson said.
“Dr. Anderson has modeled exemplary dedication to advancing undergraduate research through mentoring,” said Lindsay Currie, executive officer of CUR. “With his continued listening, his mentoring style, and his overall outlook on mentorship, Dr. Anderson is the definition of a Goldwater Scholars Faculty Mentor, and we are excited to honor him as the 2024 recipient.”
Dr. Anderson credits COA’s embrace of community and place-based, experiential approach to education the successes that so many of his mentees have had. “At COA there is no one mentor for a student, here many faculty contribute to a student’s education and development as a human ecologist,” Dr. Anderson said. “It has been a privilege to be part of all this.”
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