For the 2019-2020 school year, I had the privilege of mentoring Anna Gardner. I feel so privileged to have gotten to know her and form a relationship with her over the course of the school year, even though it was interrupted by the coronavirus pandemic. Anna is a social work major and a Spanish as well as a health and society minor from Powell, Ohio. She is enrolled in a program that will allow her to graduate with her undergraduate and graduate degrees in social work in five years.
My mentee Anna and I surprisingly have a lot in common. We both graduated from Olentangy Liberty High School and are from Powell, Ohio. We both played on the Liberty High School tennis team and so when I saw her during the ACES mentor/mentee speed dating event, it was easy to choose a friend as my number one choice for mentee. Coming from the same High School, I felt like it was much easier to discuss the transition from Liberty to Ohio State and having the same experiences and even mutual friends made our conversations that much better.
Another aspect that Anna and I have in common is our motivation behind choosing our majors and subsequent career paths. Very similarly to my younger brother, Anna’s younger brother is on the autism spectrum which had a large impact on Anna’s desire to help people and choose to major in social work. So Anna’s love for community service and individuals with special needs is the perfect marriage for her social work major, both her minors, and her being an ACES scholar.
Anna has grown tremendously between our first meeting and interview and the second time I got to chat with her. Do not get me wrong, Anna was astoundingly responsible and sure of herself during our first interview. She had a very successful high school career which set her up very well for her successful college career. Anna also came into college with her major and a plan to graduate with two degrees in five years. Since then, she has added two minors to her already impressive major and is very accomplished at Ohio State thus far. Anna is well-rounded, intelligent, and a hard worker and all of this has only been further proven to me by seeing her growth from her first semester of freshman year, to the summer before her sophomore year.
I have learned so much and have truly grown as an individual as a result of the ACES mentorship program. I have become more confident in my leadership skills by working with my mentees. Over the course of the last two years, I have discovered that one of the most important factors in being a good leader is simply being able to connect with others on a personal level. I know from my own experience that the small actions of leadership are the ones that make the biggest impact. This includes the little things such as offering to grab lunch with someone, giving words of encouragement, or simply sending a text wishing them a good week! These small actions add up and show others that you genuinely care about them.
With Anna, she was always such a joy to be around and was so much fun to hang out with, so it did not always feel like a leadership role to talk to her about her experiences, but through my time at Ohio State and in the ACES mentorship program I have learned the value of being a leader and a mentor to people that are not always so easy to talk to and who aren’t very similarly minded to myself. This year especially has shown me that when love is in short supply, good things cannot come out of it. Loving people even when they aren’t lovable is a skill that takes practice and perseverance and is worth doing every day!
I am so thankful for the ACES mentorship program from both a mentee and a mentor point of view. I believe that I have grown in my leadership abilities and overall as a person since coming to Ohio State. In this way, I believe that one of the most significant benefits of a mentoring program is the support system that it provides. I still keep in contact with my ACES mentor from my freshman year at Ohio State and she has truly been an asset and a good friend. One’s first year of college can be a very overwhelming period. There are so many unknowns involved with the transition into college. Everything from classes to getting around campus can be a daunting task. For this reason, it’s a true comfort having relationships with individuals who have gone through these same challenges.