How do mentors hELP?
Mentors provide general support overcoming obstacles to graduation and/or career exploration guidance.
As a mentor, your primary job will be to create a trusting, sustained and consistent relationship with your mentee. Within the virtual space, you will mentor your student to identify goals, use available resources, and follow-up on their progress. You do not need specific knowledge of financial aid, counseling, or college processes and procedures. Instead, you will be the person to guide your mentee to find solutions, advocate for themselves, and find success.
Mentors model Professional Paths
Connecting education to career is the main reason students seek a mentor through The Mentoring Project. Our students indicate that they don't see how their education will lead to a job. Mentors, many of whom overcame significant barriers to their own education, provide a critical role in modeling education and career paths as well as encouraging students to stay enrolled.
Mentors encourage students to Utilize campus and community resources.
Mentors listen to their mentee to clarify issues, help identify campus and community resources, advise the student to access these supports, and follow-up on a regular basis to check their progress. In this way, mentors ensure students have multi-level support as they complete their degree.
Mentors Teach specific professional and academic skills.
Research shows that regular coaching to support students to develop clear goals, guide them in connecting their daily activities to their long-term goals, support them in building aptitudes leads to a greater likelihood of graduation. Mentors will encourage students to self-advocate for themselves on campus, close achievement gaps, and utilize support services.
Mentors explain college processes and procedures.
Low-income college students are less likely to find a mentor on campus. Research found that 72% of white students found a professor as a mentor once in college whereas only 47% of racially underrepresented students found a mentor. Similarly, first-generation students are less likely than students with a college-educated parent to have had a professor as a mentor. Through regular check-ins and follow-ups, mentors will provide their mentee the encouragement to use academic supports, engage in events, activities and services and find “go-to” people on campus to help achieve goals.
“In order to be a mentor, and an effective one, one must care. You must care. You don’t have to know how many square miles are in Idaho, you don’t need to know what is the chemical makeup of chemistry, or of blood or water. Know what you know and care about the person, care about what you know and care about the person you’re sharing with.”
— Maya Angelou
Why be a mentor?
Simply put, low-income students need support to stay in college! Mentors serve a critical role in helping students find resources, troubleshoot problems, and make decisions to avert the complex set of challenges that often lead to students dropping out.
A 2015 survey commissioned by the Gates Foundation found the main obstacle to college graduation was financial need and that “most [students] work and go to school at the same and are not getting financial help from their families or the system itself. It is the stress of this juggling act that forces many to abandon their pursuit of a college degree.”
Financial need is a key obstacle, but so are other factors such as weak academic preparation, not understanding how to navigate or access college processes and procedures, confusion about degree pathways, and taking care of dependents. Issues such as fitting-in, food insecurity, and disability status make the equation more complex.
A mentor helps diminish these barriers by listening, providing perspective, connecting to resources, following-up, and demonstrating concern. Learn more about specific mentor goals and objectives.