Mentor: Dr. Joe Revelt, Director of Institutional Research

I first met Joe during the spring semester of 2012. My life at that point was a mess, so I went and spoke with Stacy after hearing about the mentoring program. There I filled out some paper work then continued with my day. A couple of days later, I was called to come back in because a mentor was found for me. When I walked in I was greeted by Stacy who then introduced me to Joe.

The way that I would describe my mentoring relationship with Joe is helpful and fun. Joe and I are always having conversations that challenge one another to think outside the way we normally do. Joe may say something that I don’t understand but we always listen to one another, express our ideas and opinions, and learn along the way. Sometimes we sit in his office and talk. Other times we may go to lunch, watch one of the school’s sports teams play, or go to an event. No matter what we choose to do, we are constantly expressing our ideas and opinions.

Joe has impacted me in a very positive way. Personally he understands that we have differences, and he respects our differences which is important to me. I feel as though I can always talk to Joe because he listens. He is also very helpful and always helps me find the answer to anything about which I am curious. Academically and professionally Joe helps me make the connections I need to be successful. He knows everybody, and I mean EVERYBODY. Everywhere we go he knows people. Since meeting Joe my grades have gone up, I’ve been more involved on campus, and I feel as though I can make it in life. Joe is always supportive of my ideas and helps to build my confidence by showing that he notices my accomplishments.

We all know having goals is important, and writing down goals makes them more concrete. How much more powerful are those goals when they are based on your own personal vision statement? And how much better is that personal vision statement when it is based on carefully identified core values? And how much more motivating and fun is it to work towards goals when you engage your mentor or mentee as a “co-conspirator?”

The Mentoring Toolkit on the MMAP’s web site provides guides for identifying values, writing a personal vision statement, setting goals, and creating action steps and timelines for reaching those goals. These are activities that are important for everyone periodically throughout life, especially during those pivotal stages. Mentors and mentees are encouraged to work on these types of exercises together and then be accountable to each other during the mentoring partnership.

Also, we’ve just posted a new guide: 100 Things To Do With Your Mentee. Over the past decade, a lot of lists have been published along these lines, but this is one of best. Although it is geared toward youth mentoring, there is a number of interesting ideas here if you’re willing to try something new. Even if you try one or two activities, you may find your mentoring will benefit a great deal.

Have you and your mentor/mentee tried a few activities like these? How did it go? Even if you feel planned activities don’t fit your mentoring style, you might want to try something new. If you do, let us know how it goes!

If you and your mentor or mentee are meeting regularly, it’s likely you will have a valuable experience, but to improve and maximize your time together, here are a few suggestions:

Remember Conversations
Taking notes during conversations should become commonplace. Even if you are doing something together, such as walking or eating, when an important topic worth remembering comes up, you may want to stop and make a note on your phone. If you’re a paper-and-pen kind of person, make sure you always have paper and pen with you when you meet.

Take a few minutes at the end of your meetings to go over your notes together, especially those things you’ve agreed to accomplish before the next meeting. Restate a few important things your mentor or mentee said, and make sure you both have the same understanding of your conversation.

Ask for Advice
Both mentors and mentees can benefit from asking for advice. It may seem like a common-sense suggestion, but sometimes it takes practice to ask for someone’s opinion about a situation or problem.

Mentors can benefit from asking their mentee to teach them something at which their mentee excels. Likewise, mentees should regularly open the door for their mentor to share their thoughts and offer advice. Remember that good mentors will hesitate to offer their opinion unless asked.

Nothing says you are genuinely interested more than asking for someone’s advice or expertise.

Be Active Between Meetings
This is where those notes come in handy. Add any action items to your to-do list between meetings. If you said you were going to do something, make sure you follow through and do it.

Don’t hesitate to send reminders and notes of encouragement to your mentor or mentee. It’s never a bad idea to add these types of things to your calendar or to-do list either.

Plan Ahead and Be Creative
Take a few minutes the day before your meeting to jot down questions and discussion topics. Refer to any notes from your last meeting (again). If you both do this ahead of time, you will find your time is too short.

If you are mentoring a high school or middle school student, this is especially important. Learn what your mentee likes and plan your meetings around that. If your mentee enjoys Mad Libs, have some fun with Mad Libs! But also plan an activity that will foster discussion, such as looking at family photos and learning about each others’ families.

Remember that mentoring meetings should be both fun and meaningful. Be creative in planning your time together. Take the pressure off and have some fun, but also create opportunities that open the door for meaningful discussion.

The MMAP has some great resources available for mentors and mentees on our online Mentoring Toolkit. We’ve also recently compiled a list of 51 Things To Do With Your Mentee to get you on track for a great semester of mentoring. Email us if you’d like us to send you a copy!

Things Every Mentee Should Know or Learn:

1. Learning is a lifetime occupation. Even top athletes continue to have coaches.
2. Negotiation is better than confrontation.
3. Competition is good but cooperation is better. Working individually is good, but working as part of a team is better.
4. Always share the glory. Always.
5. Attitude counts as much as performance. People may forget who won or who lost, bu they never forget how you treated them.
6. Reputation counts. Teaming up with winners makes you a winner.
7. If you want good answers, you need to learn to ask good questions.
8. Having goals is important, but goals without a vision are meaningless. Goals tell you what. Vision tells you why.
9. How you feel is not important. It’s what you do that counts.
10. You always have a choice, but every decision has consequences.

Things Every Mentor Should Do:

1. Listen more; talk less.
2. Empathize; don’t sympathize. Sympathizing makes people feel like victims.
3. Share your failures as well as your successes. Focus on what you learned.
4. Emphasize your struggles to get to where you are.
5. Understand the uniqueness of each individual. What worked for you may not work for someone else.
6. Explain the unspoken rules, the imaginary lines.
7. Encourage responsibility.
8. Communicate high, but not unrealistic, expectations.
9. Understand your role: to help the other grow in wisdom, judgement, resilience, and independence.
10. Don’t become overly partisan. Part of your role is to offer perspective.

Do you agree or disagree with these lists? Are there important things from your own experience you would add?

Hopefully you are all looking forward to a great semester of mentoring! Ideally, you’ve already done a good job of meeting and getting to know each other. Now to keep things on track and to make the most of your mentoring this spring, here are a few important things to keep in mind:

Reflect and Evaluate
Taking time to periodically reflect on what you’ve learned so far and evaluate your progress together is one of the most valuable benefits of a “formal” mentoring partnership.

• Review your mentoring agreement
  Remember the goals and expectations for mentoring you talked about in the beginning? Now would be a perfect time to review them and talk about how you’re doing. You may find it helpful to revise these expectations to bring them more in line with what you hope to accomplish together during the spring. If you need a copy of your mentoring agreement, simply contact the MMAP.
• Use the Reflection Tools in the Mentoring Toolkit
  The MMAP has posted some excellent exercises that you can use during your next meeting. These tools can help guide your discussion about what you’ve learned and what changes you can make to build an even stronger mentoring partnership.

Plan Ahead
Planning when and how often you will meet and how to make the most of your time together is equally important, especially now that your schedules may have changed since the fall. You may find you have more time, or you may need to be creative in order to meet regularly and keep in touch between meetings.

• Set a New Meeting Schedule
  Take the time now to set up a tentative meeting schedule for the semester. This schedule can and should be flexible, but if mentoring is high on your priority list, you both will benefit in the end.  Try including some new activities, events, or service opportunities that you both would enjoy. Challenge each other, and have fun doing it.
• Identify Personal Values, Visions, and Goals
  Work together to identify two or three personal goals for each of you this semester. Mentors and mentees both benefit from sharing what they’d like to accomplish and then being accountable to each other. If you haven’t yet, you might check out the “Building Momentum” exercises in the Mentoring Toolkit. These tools can be helpful in identifying personal values, visions, and goals.

How do you and your mentoring partner plan to kick off the semester? Leave a comment below!

Even if the rewards don’t appear to be immediate, even if it doesn’t “feel” like mentoring is making a difference, mentors and mentees can rest assured that where there is genuine concern combined with open lines of communication, mentoring is truly having an important, positive impact.

A research brief recently published by UCLA asserts that “successfully navigating through college requires social capital from different sources—namely relationships rooted in the college or university context…  which can in turn increase institutional attachment—an important predictor of college student retention (Tinto, 1987).”

People often form relationships with many different mentors who meet different needs at different times throughout their life. In some situations, especially when thrown into an entirely new environment, a person can find it difficult to identify and form those relationships in the course of their daily routine. For some students, becoming involved in an intentional mentoring partnership while at college can make all the difference in their journey to success.

Here are a few ways that I’ve personally seen mentors truly making a difference, usually without realizing it:

• Mentors listen. They provide a safe sounding board for their mentee’s ideas and opinions.
• Mentors encourage their mentee when they are on the right track.
• Mentors help explore possible solutions to problems, questions, and concerns.
• Mentors express admiration and are personally inspired when their mentee shows good character.
• Mentors energize their mentee and build their confidence simply by being genuinely interested.
• Mentors help remove fear from their mentee’s future and replace it with possibility.

What are some ways you’ve found mentoring has made an important difference for you?

How can mentors and mentees recognize and celebrate the impact of their partnership?

Leave a reply below!

It’s also a good idea to set a date for your next meeting in the spring semester.  Keep in mind it’s certainly nice to check in a couple of times over the vacation.  You may even consider using the time to engage in some community service activities together.

Don’t forget January 1^st is also a time for New Year’s resolutions.  If for any reason your mentoring partnership is not what you anticipated and you’d like to make it better, this could be a good resolution for 2013.  The MMAP staff is always here to support you with ways to make the most of your mentoring partnership.  A phone call (717) 871-5344 or email to MMAP is a great start.

With warm wishes for a happy holiday,

Stacy and Andrea

A strong mentoring relationship is not about simply seeking and giving answers. Good mentors are genuinely interested in how and what their mentee thinks, and by asking questions more often than providing answers, mentors encourage their mentees to develop critical thinking skills.

In his article, “How to Be a Better Mentor,” Erik Thompson suggests mentors and mentees try keeping a “question vs. answer tally” on a pad during their next meeting. He says that many who have tried this are surprised by how few questions they ask.

Mastering the art of asking creatively framed questions is a skill that both mentors and mentees can practice and develop while strengthening their relationship. Here is a sampling of the kinds of questions a mentor might ask.

• Credibility-building questions: “As I think back to my experience in college, time management was a huge barrier to my success. What do you think is a major barrier to your success in college?
• “Why?” questions: “Why did you decide on Business Administration as your major?” or “Why do you think Business Administration is a better choice for you as a major than Economics?”
• Personal understanding questions: “I understand you came to Millersville because a lot of your friends chose to come here. How easy have you found it to make new friends?”
• Passion questions: “What do you love most about your part-time job working in a nursing home?”
• Value-added advice questions: “Have you considered starting a student organization for people interested in reaching out to the elderly? I know someone who started an organization for students interested in local government. It’s been a great experience for them.”
• Future-oriented questions: “You’ve done a great job bringing up your GPA this semester. What do you think you might do this semester to keep the momentum going?”
• Aspiration questions: “As you look ahead to life after graduation from Millersville, what are you most excited about accomplishing?”
• Organizational culture questions: “What do you think are the most common reasons why students leave Millersville?” or “What characteristics do you think a student must possess in order to excel at Millersville?”
• Decision-making questions: “If you were given the opportunity to either study abroad or take an internship, how would you choose one over the other?”

Source

Here at the MMAP office, we are always on the lookout for resources that can help support mentoring partnerships.  Stacy found an interesting blog on creativity and problem solving.  As we all know, problems are a part of our daily lives.  It is our approach to solving them that can most influence a positive outcome.  In her blog,  “Artistry of Change,”  Carla Reiger asserts that problems are the basis of creativity.  Without problems, we would not be challenged to use our creativity and explore new possibilities.

The following five questions can be used to frame a creative approach to problem-solving:

1. What is the problem you face in terms of a state of mind?
   This question can help clarify the problem.
   For example – I am overwhelmed by my priorities.
2. What is your ideal outcome?
   Your ideal outcome involves the mindset needed to solve the problem.
   For example – My ideal outcome is to be confident about how to deal with my priorities.
3. What’s good about having this problem to deal with right now?
   All situations have their pros and cons.  This question can help you identify any benefits you will gain from working through this problem.
4. What needs to burn away so that the right solution can manifest?
   A metaphor like this can help you identify a mindset, an assumption, or point of view that’s creating a barrier to solving your problem.
5. If I were exceptional at (the task required), what would I do that I am not doing now?
   This question can help you think outside of a limited view you may have of your abilities.

Carla suggests that once you put your problem through the creative questions approach, the key is to act quickly on the action steps that emerge.  A creative approach is a less stressful and more empowering way to approach your problems.  The next time you and your mentoring partner are discussing a particular problem, you might try discussing a creative approach together.

1. Confirm your meeting time and location
   A simple miscommunication about when and where you’ll be meeting can be frustrating and take up valuable time. A quick email or phone call one or two days before your meeting is good professional practice and can go a long way toward keeping things on track.
2. Allow time; be focused
   It is important to your mentor or mentee that you are able to clear your mind, focus, and be present during your time together. Avoid feeling rushed, hurried or distracted by things on your to-do list.
3. Make a list of questions or topics for discussion
   Both mentors and mentees can benefit from jotting down some notes for discussion before your meeting. You may even consider emailing your thoughts and ideas to your mentor or mentee a day or two before your meeting. This will help guide your discussion around things about which you are genuinely curious.
4. Review your notes from your last meeting
   Getting in the habit of making a few notes during or immediately after your meeting is a great way to make sure you are actively following up on ideas, suggestions, questions and concerns. A quick review of these notes is an important reminder of what was said, what you did in response since your last meeting, and anything that could use additional follow-up.

Preparing for your meetings is one important way to make the most of your time together. What do you do before your mentoring meetings? If you have other ideas, leave a reply below.