Mentoring
Mentoring is something that is used every day in life. People are often mentors and do not even realize it. There are two different types of mentoring that can take place. The first is informal mentoring, an example of which would be directing someone to a classroom or helping someone understand an assignment. The second is formal mentoring which takes place in a workplace or school. The organization assigns someone to mentor a colleague, and make sure that they fully understand the tasks given, and are a resource in a situation that the mentee cannot resolve themselves. Both methods are very effective in everyday life and are used by many people. Organizations can bring greater predictability to the workplace by establishing formal mentoring systems. Mentoring is a method people use to help other in making sure that things are done efficiently and effectively and that people have the support they need when they are stuck in a situation they may not be used to dealing with and may not know how to fix.
In order to better understand how mentoring can be applied in a real world situation, we interviewed three people in the St. Lawrence Business faculty who are directly involved in mentoring. First we mentored Melinda Vanzanten, who was a mentee, Ann Vadala, who was her mentor, and finally John Conrad, who organizes mentoring in the faculty.
Our first interviewee was Melinda Vanzanten, who gave us some personal accounts of how mentoring has affected her professionally. She explained that many of the challenges a new faculty member faces is basic procedural activities. She was grateful to have someone she could go to for quick “housekeeping” questions. She was also very impressed by the openness of her mentor and was put at ease by her right away. Melinda Vanzanten was very quick to support mentoring within the workplace and believes that it is an essential