Mentoring

I've spent some time at this conference mentoring: A student from MIT was giving her first talk ever on Thursday, and I bought her a drink. Also, this student from Brazil (she's American) gave a talk on topics related to things I work on, but from talking to her, and from seeing her talk, it was clear that she doesn't have enough people around in her department to help her make sense of everything. (And then AvS, bigshot who I'm standing in for tomorrow, lit into her! I think he didn't know how isolated she is...) So I spent about 45 minutes with her talking her through her talk in particular, and how to give a talk in general, and assumptions that are made and not made, and how to format examples, and so forth. Really, it's amazing she did as well as she did considering how intellectually isolated she is. I tried to give her some encouragement, and strongly suggested she get out of there, or at least try to correspond with people by email (like me).