KCC Connections Student Mentoring Program

A mentor is someone who allows you to see the hope inside yourself. Oprah Winfrey

Show me a successful individual and I’ll show you someone who had real positive influences in his or her life. I don’t care what you do for a living—if you do it well I’m sure there was someone cheering you on or showing the way. A mentor. Denzel Washington

Most of us can trace at least a part of our success to people who have served as mentors in our lives. Mentoring often develops organically, but many of our students have lives that do not allow the space for them to connect with faculty and staff at Kingsborough. The goal of the KCC Connections Student Mentoring Program is to provide students the opportunity to connect with faculty, staff, and alumni  who can serve as mentors.

The delicate balance of mentoring someone is not creating them in your own image, but giving them the opportunity to create themselves. Steven Spielberg

The program offers professional development to faculty, staff, and alumni around mentoring students, invites students to mentoring, and provides support for mentoring relationships. 

FAQs for mentors:

What does it mean to be a mentor?

Not quite a friend, not quite an advisor, and not a counselor or therapist, a mentor serves as a listener and a guide. As mentors, we come to understand the complexities of our students’ lives, develop a set of skills and strategies for helping them succeed, and enter into a reciprocal relationship where both parties can benefit.

What kind of a commitment are mentors asked to make?

The KCC Connections Student Mentoring Program at Kingsborough asks each mentor to connect with their mentee regularly each semester (we suggest every other week or weekly) in whatever way works for both parties – zoom, email, phone – or some combination. We are using Chronus software to manage the program and have set the length of the relationship to six months – one semester and one module – but you can adjust this as you and your mentee see fit. Some mentors keep in touch for just one semester, while others might continue to do so long after students have graduated.

If I want to become a mentor, what do I need to do?

We ask mentors to participate, via zoom, in an online orientation (around an hour and a half) where we discuss some best practices of mentoring including how to help students set goals, how to establish trust and set boundaries in the mentoring relationship, and how to achieve closure when the mentoring relationship comes to an end. We also share information about Kingsborough resources and how to refer students who might be in need of those resources.

Then mentors (and mentees) are invited to create profiles in the mentoring software and students are shown the “best matches,” but are free to peruse all of the mentors in order to choose the one they feel would be best for them and request mentoring from that mentor. Mentors receive the mentoring request, look at the student’s profile and accept or gently reject the request. Mentors might also make themselves available for additional “one-off” mentoring, where they meet with a different student for a single session.

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The program is coordinated by Janine Graziano, Professor of English. If  you’d like more information, or wish to become a mentor, please contact Janine at [email protected].