I was walking through Olin Library one afternoon when it happened. Libe café seemed particularly crowded during the first full week of classes — coats draped over chairs, laptops open, conversations hovering somewhere between urgency and early fatigue. As I passed in the hall, I noticed a familiar face at one of the tables. A former student: she looked up from her conversation, recognized me, and waved enthusiastically. I waved back. I didn't stop; she was sitting with a friend and I didn't want to interrupt. We both went on with our afternoons. And yet, I carried that moment, and the warmth it brought, with me for the rest of the day. I've also been thinking about it ever since.
As we complete the first full week of the semester — new classes underway, new professors and students finding their footing, new routines beginning to take shape — it’s worth pausing over moments like this one. Not because of what was said (nothing was), but because of what it quietly confirmed. On a campus as large as Cornell, moments like this happen constantly and usually vanish without a trace. But sometimes, they don’t. The wave in Olin reminded me that the opposite is also true. The connections we make here have a way of stretching forward. What begins during these first weeks may still be unfolding years from now.
When I first started teaching — especially larger lectures and seminars in Paris — I was told a familiar story about how it all works. A semester begins, material is delivered and assignments are graded. And then — cleanly, efficiently — everyone moves on. The relationship, like the Canvas site, eventually closes. Teaching, in this version, is bounded by syllabi and semesters. There is truth to that story. Teaching is labor (as is learning). It is sometimes exhausting. There are limits to what any of us can offer, and those limits deserve respect. The rhythm of the semester exists for a reason. But that story is also incomplete.
What rarely gets said — especially from the faculty side — is that students don’t simply vanish when the semester ends. They reappear, unexpectedly, months or years later. In your inbox, in a hallway, at Zeus. I still receive emails — sometimes months later, sometimes years — from students I taught in earlier chapters of my career. They write not for grades or recommendations, but simply to share news: a new job, a book they read that reminded them of something we discussed, a question they’ve been turning over. Just this week, I heard from a former student I hadn’t taught in several years, writing to tell me about an acceptance that mattered deeply to them. There was no request attached. Just a desire to share a moment of joy — to loop me back into a story I’d once been part of. That’s when it becomes clear that mentorship doesn’t end: it just changes form. Students stay with us in ways the institutional calendar doesn’t capture.
For us professors, this is the part no syllabus prepares you for: the way a student's trajectory keeps unfolding long after they leave your classroom, and how much it matters — to them, and to you — when they choose to let you see it. Mentorship is often framed as something instrumental: guidance toward a specific goal or advice at a crossroads. And yes, those things matter. But mentorship also shows up in a quieter sense. It's the ongoing knowledge that someone once took you seriously — and still does.
This part of teaching is rarely discussed. Universities have become very good at measuring what happens inside the frame: credits earned, requirements met, outcomes achieved. Perhaps this part feels too personal, too soft, in an environment that often prizes productivity and output. But it’s real. I always feel sad on the last day of class. I feel pride when my students thrive. We all remember names, conversations, office-hour confessions, moments of hesitation or brilliance that students may not realize lingered. We carry those stories with us, even as the institutional calendar insists on renewal and replacement.
I remember my first class at Cornell in late August 2024. I had barely arrived the day before, but the details of that room, that discussion, are still with me. I’ve come to believe that mentorship, when it’s real, is something else entirely. It’s a relationship that keeps breathing. And we feel something like recognition when students come back into view — even just long enough to wave.
This is why I’ve come to think of office hours not as a time slot, but as a metaphor. Office hours suggest availability, openness, and an invitation to knock. But the most meaningful moments of teaching can happen after the course has ended. They don’t appear on transcripts, but they shape lives. In my first column, I wrote about office hours — about the strange, underused gift of an open door. Lately, I’ve been thinking about how to extend that idea. I think part of the answer is time.
So as we begin again this semester — new classes, new faces, new possibilities — I’d offer this: the relationships you form here are not confined to the semester that holds them. They stretch and return. They show up, years later, across a crowded room. That wave in Olin mattered because it reminded me that education is not just a sequence of courses, but a web of relationships over time. Teaching is a long conversation, sometimes paused, sometimes resumed, sometimes reduced to a single gesture. As I left the library that day, I realized that I would likely remember that wave longer than many other exchanges because it affirmed something essential: that learning is relational, that recognition endures, and that the work we do here doesn't always announce itself when it's happening.
That's the part I didn't expect, years ago when I first stood in front of a classroom: how much of teaching happens after the teaching is done.
The Sun is interested in publishing a broad and diverse set of content from the Cornell and greater Ithaca community. We want to hear what you have to say about this topic or any of our pieces. Here are some guidelines on how to submit. And here’s our email: opinion-editor@cornellsun.com.
Jan Burzlaff is an Opinion Columnist and a Postdoctoral Associate in the Program for Jewish Studies. Office Hours (Open Door Edition) is his weekly dispatch to the Cornell community — a professor’s reflections on teaching, learning and the small moments that make a campus feel human. Readers can submit thoughts and questions anonymously through the Tip Sheet here. He can also be reached at profjburzlaff@cornellsun.com.
