<p>This commentary is a personal reflection based on the experiences of the authors, who attribute their professional success to the mentorship they received as doctoral candidates. Their supervisors remain paradigms of what the role should be if the Ph.D. in mathematics education is to reflect expertise at the intersection of the fields of mathematics, pedagogy, and the students’ cognitive development in mathematics. The authors first situate their characterization of mathematics education in their original 3D model and, through introspective analysis, demonstrate the ways in which their supervisors simultaneously exemplified the conceptual model and expected the same high standards from mentees. The commentary questions “the fit” of many current dissertations and, by extension, the ensuing qualifications of supervisors of mathematics education studies to the model, and closes with statements of gratitude for the women and standards that were uncompromising because of the high esteem in which they held the integrative field.</p>