F. Daniel Hidalgo
Professor Hidalgo’s leadership statement
“As an advisor and teacher, I try to lead by being genuinely open about the research process, about uncertainty, and about failure. Too often, graduate students see only the finished product of research: the published paper, the polished talk. My approach is to bring students into the mess of it from the start — the dead ends, the methods that didn’t work, the questions that had to be abandoned and rebuilt. I run my advising and courses this way deliberately, because I think the most important thing a mentor can do is demystify the process rather than perform mastery of it. That also means being responsive to what students actually bring: their own questions, methods, and instincts, even when those differ from my own.”
