Quality time with Dr. Hill: Distinguished Graduate Mentor 2024-25
For many graduate students, a mentor may serve as a leader, a guide, and a supporter. For some especially fortunate graduate students, a mentor may also serve as a trusted friend.
By Kassidy Guy
Each year, the College of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies (CGPS) recognizes a graduate faculty member who has demonstrated exceptional leadership to graduate students, both in academic settings and beyond.
The 2024-25 recipient of Distinguished Graduate Mentor (DGM) Award is Dr. Janet Hill (PhD) from the Western College of Veterinary Medicine (WCVM).
Hill serves as the head of the Department of Veterinary Microbiology and principal investigator of the Hill Lab. Since 2007, over 50 undergraduate students, graduate students and postdoctoral scholars have contributed to the lab under Hill’s supervision.
When working with students, Hill believes that offering mentorship and support is a top priority.
“Mentorship is something I take really seriously and something I’ve spent a lot of time and effort on throughout my career, so recognition is nice.”
For Hill, the mentor-mentee relationship is not a one-sided obligation, but a partnership.
“It’s such a huge commitment [the students] are making, especially now,” said Hill. “The pressures on students now, especially international students, they’re managing so much. I think we must meet that [commitment] with equal, if not greater, investment.”
In Hill’s eyes, a mentor’s responsibilities in the partnership are to set expectations, to build trust, and above all: to be there.
According to Hill, the best part of her week is her one-on-one meetings with each of her students, a long-standing commitment she fondly refers to as “quality time”.
“I started jokingly calling our weekly meetings ‘quality time’, because it wasn’t about the quantity, it was about quality,” said Hill. “Sometimes you talk about science and sometimes it’s just about how [the students] are doing.”
Throughout her time as a mentor, Hill has been honoured to watch the students she’s supervised grow and move on to new challenges and opportunities.
Hill proudly displays a shelf full of bound theses of former students in her office. On particularly challenging days, she will take a thesis off the shelf, and read the acknowledgements, often finding a message addressed to her, thanking her for her support as a mentor.
“Grad school is really hard,” said Hill. “If a student can come out of that experience feeling positive enough about it to thank me, it truly means so much to me.”