Why get a mentor College students today are under enormous pressure, specifically relating to what happens after graduation. Mentors are adept at helping students manage this stress, and more importantly, teaching them how to maximize (and eventually monetize) their collegiate experience.
how? One on One Mentors works individually with students to help them understand what they want, what they’re good at, and how that translates to their job prospects. One on One helps students map out their future by establishing where it is they want to go. We provide the steady hand to guide them through their collegiate years, combined with the adult shoulder to lean on when things sometimes don’t go their way. We free students to try and fail, by embracing challenges and risks. We help them unlock their innate abilities, while teaching them a completely different way of understanding and tamping down stressors. With every “win” comes confidence; this growing confidence enables students to project their best selves to everyone they meet, leading to opportunities they deserve, that are fitting, and that will yield a fulfilling job.
STUDENTS: YOU ARE NOT ALONE Feeling “lost” in college is typical. In fact, feeling lost is not even new. Adults, think back to your time at school – except for the engineers and maybe some accounting students, how many of you knew exactly what you wanted to do?
What’s changed is how this feeling is getting processed, and students’ ability (or inability) to manage it. Some scary and sobering statistics to mull:
50+ – More than half of students visiting campus clinics cite anxiety as a health concern, according to a recent study of more than 100,000 students nationwide.
16 – Nearly one in six college students has been diagnosed with or treated for anxiety within the last 12 months, according to the annual national survey by the American College Health Association.
50 – Half the students in [Richard] Arum’s and [Josipa] Roksa’s recent study reported that they lacked clear goals or a sense of direction two years after graduation.
11 – 11% of business leaders interviewed in a 2014 survey believe college graduates are ready to work effectively.
7 – According to a recent survey, only 7% of hiring managers said that “nearly all” or “most” job seekers have the right combination of skills and traits that their companies need to fill open positions. Managers hiring recent college graduates rated soft skills like high integrity, a strong work ethic, accountability, self-motivation and a strong interpersonal ability, as the most critical attributes for successful candidates.
WHAT AM I GOING TO DO AFTER COLLEGE? Thinking about the “outcome” of college is already stressful to most students. Why?
Peers – We all know young people listen mostly to one another, more than to adults. Unfortunately, some of what they react to is distracting competition from their peers. Just because one student gets a plum internship doesn’t mean another student can’t get one. Social media can exaggerate this feeling of “internship envy,” as people only post or tweet their successes, making it seem like everyone else has a great job.
Parents’ friends – However well-intentioned the question “what do you want to do after college?” might be to an adult, to a teen it’s almost universally a source of nothing but stress. Moreover, adults are often judgmental about what teens aspire to do, unfairly criticizing anything that doesn’t seem to guarantee a career path.
Colleges themselves – Countless stories demonstrate that even college career counselors, professors and other well-meaning adults steer students towards jobs they don’t want. Colleges are under assault from parents to show results, increasingly measured by employment after college. As long as the school can point to statistics showing its graduates are employed, that seems to be enough, regardless of the job.
The job world – Getting a job out of school these days is indeed significantly harder than it was 20-30 years ago. Far more people have similar skills and are motivated today than in years past, and employers need fewer task people and more problem solvers.
The System. The college advisory system is impersonal at best. Despite the lofty promises made during orientation, colleges typically have far too few advisors. Even at schools with good advisor/student ratios, the quality suffers because often the counselor is a random professor who doesn’t know the student and only knows the narrow world of his own department.
The Solution
One on One Mentors. Helping college students:
- Become more independent and take charge of their college experience
- Take chances, and build resilience through their failures
- Understand what they want and how to get there
- Maximize and monetize their college years.