Soothing the Anticipation

I think my team is toying with me. I’ve signed up to mentor a student this fall and they haven’t yet told me who the young person is. I don’t have a name. I don’t have a profile. I have no knowledge of interests or aspirations. Surely this is all meant to heighten my anxiety.

After all, I do feel a bit anxious. Committing to mentor a young person is a serious matter. I feel a weight of responsibility. I believe it is on my shoulders to succeed, to give the student an amazing, perhaps transformative, learning experience. That’s a lot to expect of myself. Am I up to the task?

The research is increasingly clear on the power of mentoring. Young people who have a mentor are 50 percent more likely to go on to college than those who had no mentor, according to a survey published earlier this year by the National Mentoring Partnership. Data like this only ups the pressure.

Fortunately for me, as for all the volunteers in Spark, our program is a structured mentoring approach.  Members of Spark's program team – an energetic group of professionals – know what they’re doing. As a mentor, I participated in training and have access to a suite of resources to guide me in the experience.  There is a concrete timeframe – 10 weeks, a couple hours each week. There’s a specific skill to focus on each week with your student – networking, goal-setting and problem-solving are the first three. There is a host of example activities and resources we can use for the project my student and I will work on.  And since Spark has run so many of these apprenticeships, there are hardly any circumstances that haven’t materialized previously and, therefore, been planned for. It’s as turnkey as you can get.

This is soothing to a degree. But, I think I’m not alone when I say I want my mentoring experience to be extraordinary – certainly for my student, and hopefully for me also. I want my student to be among the ones more likely to succeed in school and go on to college. I have high expectations.

You’d think I’d have some pull around here, enough to at least get the name of the student I will mentor! I’m anxious to learn who it is, to have our first encounter, to plan our apprenticeship, to have some laughs and some serious exploration. The anticipation is surely building.