This week’s message for first-year parents was written by Allison McWilliams (’95), director of the Mentoring Resource Center.

One of the hallmarks of the Wake Forest student experience has always been great mentoring. Alumni often will speak of a special faculty member, staff member, or even another student who took the time to demonstrate an interest in his or her growth and development when they were at Wake Forest. Unfortunately, students aren’t always aware of these relationships as they are happening, which means that they are missing out on a key opportunity for more intentional relationships with these mentors.

As part of the University’s strategic goal of increasing student engagement through mentoring, we have created the Mentoring Resource Center to help both students and their mentors to be more intentional about these relationships. We are providing resources and training to faculty, staff, student orientation advisors, resident advisors, and other student leaders on how to be effective mentors, skills and tools that mentors use, and how to lead a mentoring conversation. At the same time, we are seeking opportunities to train students on skills they should develop during a mentoring relationship and how to seek out mentors on campus.

Not every student is going to find a mentor through a formal mentoring program, though several great programs do exist on campus. Instead, we encourage students (and really, this applies to everyone, not just students) to build their mentoring network. The time has come and gone for an individual to have just one mentor who is tasked with supporting all of that person’s needs. Instead, we encourage folks to seek out several mentors. For example, a student may find an older student who mentors him or her about fitting in and finding a social network. He or she also may find a staff member who mentors him or her through an internship search or a study abroad experience. And, he or she may find a faculty member who mentors him or her about professional aspirations and academic achievement. Each of these individuals is in that student’s mentoring network and each fulfills a unique role within that network.

Priscilla Claman recently described this in the Harvard Business Review as building a personal board of directors. It is guidance that is just as useful to a first-year student as to a seasoned executive: seek out people who are different than you, people who are more experienced than you, people who know more than you do, and include them in your network.

How does a first-year student do this? It’s actually easier than many of them think, especially at a place like Wake Forest, which attracts people who want to participate in these kinds of meaningful, intentional relationships:

• Make a chart of skills, knowledge, experiences, and attributes you are looking for in potential mentors. What do you want them to know, to do, to have experienced? What type of personality are you looking for?
• Identify individuals who fulfill those needs. These can be faculty, staff, students, and “adult fans” from home including your parents.
• Write out a goal statement. Why do you want this person to be your mentor? What do you hope to achieve through the course of this relationship? How long do you think the relationship might last? This goal statement will be different for the different people in your network. Remember: each one is there to fulfill a specific need.
• Go talk to them. The worst that they can say is no! And if they do it will be because they simply do not have the time or they don’t feel that they are the best person to fulfill that role. Use the goal statement that you developed to frame this conversation. Practice with someone else (your roommate, your advisor, your parent) before you have the actual conversation so that you are comfortable.

As parents, you can talk to your students about building their mentoring networks. Help them practice those difficult conversations; remember that a faculty or staff member seems intimidating, especially to first-year students.

The Mentoring Resource Center has a variety of articles and resources to help students get started.  In particular, there is a section for Mentees on what mentoring is, how to select a mentor, and how to get started using the Mentee Handbook.