During this year, I was a mentor to Alice Mason. Alice is a first year ACES student studying for neuroscience. However, Alice plans to go to grad school to study veterinary medicine. She is from Akron, Ohio. Alice is involved with several student organizations at Ohio State including CHAARG, Brain Club and Pen Pals as well as volunteering with blood drives and helping in a research lab. Even though we have very different career aspirations and are involved in different student organizations, I always looked forward to talking to Alice about them. I found that we had many similarities among our differences. For example, the research lab that Alice assists with involves her working with children. I have always loved working with children as I used to teach sunday school and have volunteered in various ways that involve children. So, I loved talking to Alice about the kids that she worked with in her lab. Also, though we do not share any student organizations besides ACES, I found that we both had similar experiences. I found my sense of belonging and community at Ohio State through an organization called Cru while Alice found hers in CHAARG. It was really cool to see a change in Alice from first to second semester that I think CHAARG had a lot to do with. Alice became much more confident and I could tell that she was enjoying herself a lot more. She had become a part of a tight knit community and made lots of new friends whose interests align with hers. At the beginning of the school year, Alice was definitely much more reserved. But I have seen a big change in her and she has opened up to me a lot more. It was also really great to see Alice become more confident in her career path. When she first started at Ohio State, she was unsure about vet school and her major. But, now she is happy to be in neuroscience and she is sure that she wants to go to vet school.
I was pretty nervous about being a mentor at the beginning of the school year. I was concerned about my mentee not liking me or me not having enough experience to help them through situations that they would come to me about. I was also nervous because at first it seemed like Alice and I had very little in common, but as we continued to get to know each other, it became clear that we actually shared a lot of qualities, experiences and interests. So, once I actually started meeting with Alice, I had no more qualms about the program and my role in it. I have also grown a lot during this experience. I have gained a lot of leadership experience and it has been really rewarding to watch Alice grow. I think that it is very important for older students to build relationships with younger ones because it can be very beneficial to share our experiences. I have loved being able to give Alice advice and help her through such a big transition in her life. Also, this program is a great way to build friendships. Whenever Alice and I would spend time together to complete our requirements for the program, it never felt like an obligation, it just felt like we were two friends spending a day together. During our interviews we would often get sidetracked talking about other topics and it would take us forever to finish the interview because we were talking about other things!
In summation, I am so grateful for the mentor program. During my time in the program, both as a mentor and mentee, I have grown tremendously while also helping others through this big transition in life. It has also been wonderful to pass on things that I learned from my mentor onto Alice. And hopefully Alice will pass on lessons learned from me and my mentor onto her mentee. This process makes me feel like I will still be very connected to the ACES program even though I have graduated and will not be as involved as I have been in the past couple of years. The mentorship program has also taught me a lot about the importance of finding commonalities. Even when someone at first appears to have very different interests and experiences than you, you can almost always find a few things that you have in common. Mentoring Alice has definitely shown that even though we appear to be very different at first, we have so many similarities and so many things to learn from each other!