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Hello everyone.
Thanks for joining us today.
My name is Dr. Ebonee Williams.
I'm the Director of Virtual Experience and Peer
Engagement Initiatives here at UC San Diego.
I work in the vice-chancellor of student affairs office,
looking at ways of leveraging
our student experience in
the remote and virtual environment,
and within connections to one another.
I am so excited to be able to lead
this initiative called Mentoring For All.
Our goal with mentoring for all is to ensure that
every student at UC San Diego has a mentor.
It's really exciting.
It's a part of our collective impact
where we're looking to have all of us
pulling in the same direction to erase
opportunity gaps at UC San Diego.
Today I'm going to talk about the value of mentoring,
and where you can find
some mentoring resources right here at UC San Diego.
But what I'm going to talk about, you can
apply to all aspects of your life,
and I'd like to say that you're probably
in a mentoring relationship right now.
Let's talk about who those people are,
what they've done, why you're in them,
and how you can probably leverage,
enhance that experience for yourself now and throughout
your college experience to ensure that you
get all you want out of that experience.
Let's talk about the benefits of mentoring.
In mentoring, you get to set goals.
Why do we want to set goals?
I'm a scientist.
An object in motion tends to stay in motion,
an object at rest will stay at rest.
Goals put us in motion.
Do we always achieve our goals?
Not always, but you may have heard
the term if you shoot for the moon,
you'll end up along the stars.
By moving somewhere, you'll get somewhere.
You get guidance on a path forward.
What are you majoring in?
What's this new field?
What's this new career?
You get to see model behaviors of successful people,
or individuals who are thriving
in the environment you may want to be in.
General sense of well-being,
that's about the connection piece of it.
Validation of your experience and affirmations.
Sometimes we have things happen to us and just
knowing someone else has had that same thing happen,
lets you know that you're not alone in the world,
lets you know that you have other people
who have thrived, survived,
and excelled despite one moment
that may not be an ideal,
or you had a triumph and
that triumph will lead to further success.
There's so many ways to connect in that validation space.
It's also a part of building a success team.
What's in success team?
It's individuals who want to see you succeed.
Individuals who model the success that you'd like to
emulate in your life and see thrive in your life,
and mentoring is a fundamental piece of that.
You can grow in all aspects.
Then we talk about having academics,
athletics, careers, relationships.
Mentoring isn't limited to just career success.
Mentoring isn't limited to
just learning one piece of life.
Some people get mentored in
their own relationships that they're trying to deal with,
or even parenting situations.
There's so many things that we get
mentored around in the world.
I want to tell you and affirm
why I believe you're already in a mentoring relationship.
You might be getting advice from somewhere,
you might be getting motivation from television,
you might have been in a training,
you might have been coached in a team,
someone may tell you you have to
do these steps to graduate,
or to get into college.
All of these are forms of mentoring,
and you have done them throughout your life.
Your schooling has taught that to you.
If you've had a job,
they've set goals that you've had to achieve.
This is the richness of
the mentoring environment that exists
already and can directly apply
to your success at the university.
I'm a first-gen student and
so none of my parents had gone to college.
There were languages and words that were used at colleges
I'd never heard of and didn't even know I need it.
This is where having an opportunity to talk to
others who may have also been first-gen,
or who just have been successful,
or who have been in the college gave
me an inside scoop on
information around like what are office hours, right?
Talking about the stages of mentoring,
you've decided based on what you want to mentor.
You have a mentor, but maybe you need a new one because
your success team needs to be
bigger because you have big goals.
This picture already shows all these steps.
Setup the mentoring relationship.
You search for one.
You have a call. You introduce. You set some goals.
These stages of mentoring are really simple,
they're are four stages.
One is you initiate and engage. What does that mean?
You look for a mentor, you ask,
you're clear about what you want to achieve,
how often you may want to meet,
what goals you want to set.
I don't want you to feel like
you have to have it perfect,
but you know you have a question.
A goal could be just simply,
"How do I get a job?
How do I get an A in this class?
How do I connect with a faculty member?
How do I get ready for graduate school?"
You can have a question, that is a goal.
There's someone on the other side, your mentor,
who should be able to answer it or give you
some guidance on where to find the answer for yourself.
Challenge in testing.
This part of the relationship is really
to know that you can trust each other.
Do you show up to the call when you
said you're going to show up to the call?
Is your mentor answering the question?
Are you coming prepared with a question?
These are both sides of the relationship that let you
know that you're both investing in a relationship,
and that's the second phase.
We've met, but now can we trust each other,
and are we willing to work on a goal together?
Develop trust and growth.
You already started to develop trust in the first phase,
the growth pieces, we're going to take on more steps.
Your mentor may ask you to do certain things.
Will you do those things?
You may take on a new skill set
or practice based on what your mentor has shared.
You may take a different class.
You may sign up for a new student org,
or join a group that you hadn't.
You may volunteer.
That's the growth piece,
that's the learning piece that comes from mentoring.
Then prepare for closure.
You've met your goal,
you've met your timeline.
Now you can say, "Well, I thank you.
This is what I think I've gotten out of this.
I really appreciate you and this
is how you've added to my life."
The mentor may reiterate what they think they've seen you
do and then you also have the opportunity to say,
"Well, we have more time together,
here's a different question
I'd like to tackle with you now
that we have a rapport and a relationship."
Relationships can be short-term spot mentoring
where you just have a quick question and
someone answers it really quickly.
It can be short-term,
maybe it's a month,
maybe it's three months.
UCSD works on the quarter,
I would say short-term would be a quarter of mentoring.
Is it long-term?
Is it throughout your four years,
or five years,
or two years, depending on what type of
student you are at UC San Diego.
Then there's the lifetime mentoring.
Some of us will be mentored forever by our parents
because they are genuinely
invested in us. We have rapport.
For those of you who may not have parents that
do that for you, we find uncles,
we have cousins, we have people
in our community who do that mentoring for us.
Just know that there's someone that has been interested,
or has already probably started
mentoring you throughout your life.
I want you to just take a moment and think about
those great relationships that you've had in mentoring,
and what are some of the characteristics of
an effective mentor that show up for you?
What kind of support does a mentor provide?
When I think about characteristics,
I think about someone who's value's aligned with mine,
someone who's committed and dedicated,
someone who has a little energy,
because I have a little energy,
may be different for you.
Then the support they provide
ranges based on what I'm asking,
and what I'm interested in.
Know that there's no right or wrong answer
to those questions,
but I want you to know what are
the things that you're looking for so that you
know when you find a good fit
and someone who might be able to
answer your questions or help you achieve your goals.
At UC San Diego,
we already have a rich mentoring ecosystem.
We have our faculty.
Our faculty mentor our students on a regular basis,
in classes, through office,
which I'm trying to change to
student hours, through one-on-one connections,
through lab time, there's a lot of
opportunities to have that space.
We also have advisors, academic advisors,
advisors in other courses,
all types of advisors at UCSD.
Some of you may work at a job or work here.
We have supervisors, we have teaching
assistants which support our classes,
we have graduate students for
people who may get in a research lab,
or they may be the teaching assistants themselves.
They meet as we walk around
campus and you see that they may have
a little seizing on them
and they can answer a question for you.
There's also mentor programs, coaching,
as well as your friends have been
mentors to you and can continue to be mentors to you.
Know, that there's a rich system already in place.
You can also go to mentoring.ucsd.edu.
At mentoring.ucsd.edu you'll find resources,
or resource guide.
You'll find resources videos
that'll teach you about our campus,
you'll also find a resource list that'll help you answer
some questions for yourself while you're
waiting for your mentor to come on board,
or for you and your mentor to explore together.
When you go there, you can click on
"Program Guide".
You can go and be proactive
and look at the different names of programs,
you can look at what year or type of student you are,
what specific groups,
or majors, or fields,
and then the type of mentoring,
and some of the mentoring at UCSD even comes with
credit that you can get to add to your transcript.
You can also go to Tritons Connect,
which is UCSD's LinkedIn for our community.
Our alumni are highly engaged in that space.
Students are welcome to join.
We even have some community members
who are in there and they can say they're
looking for a mentee and you can look for them and
you can look and see who would
fit based on who says they're available.
There's also a program called
Mentoring For All which I started with,
that you can click on and we are going to start doing
force matching of people who are aligned.
We asked questions like,
how often do you want to meet?
We ask are you first-gen?
We ask you, are you a transfer student?
Some of the pieces that get into
the nuances of how to connect with you.
When you go to Tritons Connect this
is the page and what it'll look like.
You can look for find a mentor,
or look for mentoring relationships.
Because sometimes you may have
already been paired into one.
Other resources at UCSD that I want
to brag about are Triton tools and tidbits,
the podcast that has come to connect
another way our students to campus resources.
There's some great stuff in there that may
answer some of your basic questions.
You didn't do so well on the exam,
so how do you recover from academic disappointment?
You're looking for someone
to write a letter of rec, what does that look like?
You need to write a paper, there's a writing.
You want to connect to a faculty member,
there's one in there for that.
You have resources available to you also
separate from the mentors and
the individuals who may sign up.
In the end,
we're so excited to ensure that our system at UCSD
provides mentoring and stewardship of
your success at our institution.
We want every student at UCSD who
wants a mentor to have a mentor.
Thank you for your time.
It's been my pleasure.
My name is Dr. Ebonee Williams and I hope you enjoy
mentoring and took some value out of this presentation.
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