Finding a Mentor: Immediately Grow in Your Career

Finding a mentor in college can be a game-changer for any student looking to get ahead or figure out what their life will look like after college. Having a good mentor can provide invaluable guidance, advice, and support that helps you make the most of your college experience while helping you reach your personal and professional goals.

Not to mention, they will help ease the anxiety and uncertainty that comes with the transition from college to the real-world.

With the right mentor, you will gain access to knowledge and resources that can help you excel in your studies, land internships and jobs, and set yourself on the path to success. In this blog post, we’ll discuss the benefits of a mentor and how to find the right one for you.

What is a mentor?

Why should I have a mentor?

Guidance and support

A mentor’s main goal is to help you navigate new situations and help you make decisions that align with your personal and professional goals. They’ll be there to give advice and share their own experiences. They’ll also be a good sounding board for you to talk through you decisions with and support whatever you decide is best for you.

Networking opportunities

The right mentor will leverage their connections to assist you in learning about fields that interest you and help you gain opportunities that you otherwise may not have access to. They will likely have been working in their field for many years and have plenty of connections.

Accountability

Because you’ve likely shared your goals with your mentor, they’ll hold you accountable for taking the steps required to reach your goals. They’ll be your biggest cheerleader, but also make sure that you don’t get distracted.

You should meet with them regularly and provide feedback for one another on how the relationship is benefitting both of you as well as feedback on the progress towards your goals.

Skill development

Sharing skills that you want to develop will enable them to share experiences or exercises that can help you grow that skill. For example, hearing about your mentor’s experience with giving presentations might give you insight into how to prepare for your next presentation or relaxation techniques to use if you get anxious before presenting.

Increased confidence

As mentioned, your mentor wants nothing but the greatest success for you and they’ll help you reach your full potential. Working towards goals and meeting them instills so much confidence.

Growing your confidence will lead to success both in personal and professional settings. Gaining some confidence can start with learning from someone more experienced.

Different perspectives

The greatest tool in any decision making process is knowledge. Having a greater understanding of the situation or task at hand is so important. A mentor can provide a different perspective than your own and challenge your understanding of a current situation.

Emotional support

Because your mentor has likely been in your shoes or in a similar situation before, they will have more empathy for the experiences you’re going through. This emotional support can improve your emotional awareness as you’ll feel more validated in feelings of stress or anxiety surrounding unfamiliar situations.

Having someone who has been through similar challenges as a resource can help ease worries as you’ll feel more confident in their advice.

Career advancement

There’s so much to learn about the professional world once you enter the industry. Most of the time opportunities are missed because we don’t even know they exist.

A mentor can help you navigate advocating for yourself to your boss, negotiating salaries, and ways to prioritize work-life balance.

Personal growth

The skills that a mentor helps you develop are not only professional skills, but personal as well. Communication, self-awareness, advocating, empathy, and resilience are skills that will lead to success in all parts of your life.

Long-term relationships

More than anything else, your mentor will become a friend and confidant. Whether you talk everyday or once a year, they’ll always have your back and be ready to help you tackle the next challenge in your life.

Interested in other career related content? Check out these posts!

1. What to Expect the First Day on the Job
2. Preparing for Career Fair: 5 Quick Tips to Make a Good Impression
3. 5 Tips for a Successful Post-Graduation Job Search: How to Land Your Dream Job (or at least a starting point)

How do I find a Mentor?

The first step to finding a mentor is to know what you think you need mentorship for. This is key because you’ll want to reach out to/find someone with expertise in that area.

Do you want a mentor for you major? Research at your university? Or will your mentorship be focused on potential career paths after college?

Once you’ve answered these questions you’ll know where to start your search.

College Mentor

If you feel like you’d benefit from a mentor at your university the best place to search is just that: at your university.

Universities will typically have programs for mentorship. Some of them are even major specific and can be broken down further into professor and student mentors. This gives you a variety of different perspectives to explore, all within the same topic.

Students

An upperclassmen student may be able to give advice from a more relatable view. They recently went through the emotions and experiences that you are which may make it easier to consider their advice when it comes to topics like: which class is easier? Does this professor grade tough?

Professors

A professor is likely to have more insight on the college to real-world transition. They also had to make the decision to either return to school or enter industry and begin working.

While they may not give you advice on which professors will be easier graders, they have a lot of overall life experience and can speak to graduate school admissions, networking, high-level research, and many other topics.

It’s a bonus if you connect with a professor that you enjoyed taking their class. They may even be able to connect you with research on campus if that’s something you’re interested in.

Research Mentor

Research mentors can usually be found in a university database. There are always labs looking for undergraduates to train and inspire to continue their education and research post-graduation. Use this database to look into research projects happening on campus and then reach out to any groups that seem interesting to you.

If your school does not have a database, look into the major specific websites and browse professor biography pages. Here you can see the research that they work on outside of class and if something seems intriguing you can reach out.

Your advisor may also have insight into labs and research mentors that could be a good fit.

Similar to professors, a research mentor will be someone who is beyond their university years and has spent quite some time exploring very specific areas in educational or societal innovations.

A research mentor will have very specialized knowledge, which if it’s in a field you’re interested in, can be incredibly beneficial for your future. You’ll likely work alongside them on a project in their lab. This way you’ll get very hands-on experience working on experimentation. This is a good way to learn your likes and dislikes in terms of work before making the decision to return to school or enter the industry.

Industry Mentor

Industry mentors may be the most challenging to find, but if you’re looking to enter corporate America after graduation they can be incredibly valuable. The best way to find one is to network.

While it may seem impossible to find people that are willing to invest time into your growth and career goals outside of their busy lives, there are more people out there than you think that are excited to invest in you.

A good place to start is by applying to internships. Getting a job in the industry that you want to work in or in an adjacent industry can help you meet people who have worked similar paths or who had similar goals. Even if the perfect mentor isn’t at the company you work at, they may know someone who could be a good fit.

When you start a role, regardless of what you’re working on, connect with people you meet on LinkedIn. This will expand your network and give you an easy way to communicate with experienced people in your desired industry.

Some companies have mentorship programs specifically for students to be matched with experienced professionals from the company. This is something to take advantage of if you want to participate in something less intensive than a co-op program AND get the benefits of a mentorship relationship.

It’s a bonus if you’re really interested in the company too because the mentor relationship will give you access to resources other applicants may not have.

Regardless of if it’s at school or in industry, It’s important to voice that you want to have a mentorship relationship so that the people you do know can help guide you in the best direction to form that relationship.

Overall, a mentor can be an invaluable asset in your personal and professional development. They’ll become a true support system, providing a range of benefits that can help you achieve your goals and reach your full potential. If you have the chance in college to form a mentorship connection, you should definitely take advantage of the opportunity!

Share your best mentorship insights in the comments below!