Mentors

"My wife and I invited my protégé to have dinner at our home with a small group of visitors from Botswana and some colleagues from my wife's firm. This was a social event, but I think he appreciated it as a "learning" event as well."
~2004 SAMI Mentor

The Mentor Experience:

Harvard's Student-Alumni Mentoring Initiative strives to nurture growth and development among program participants, protégés and mentors alike. This program offers alumni a unique opportunity for interacting with and becoming involved in the Harvard Graduate School of Education community, as well as with the University as a whole. Mentors learn about and act upon the theories and practices of personal, professional, and educational mentoring. They have the opportunity to interact once again with members of the HGSE faculty by visiting classes with their mentees, or sitting in on a University lecture of mutual interest.

Mentoring should be an experience that entails reciprocal benefit, and this program hopes to foster the experience of shared learning. Mentors will be given the opportunity to reflect upon their own academic and professional experiences, and will ideally learn about themselves in conjunction with their mentee. Mentors will be able to simultaneously give back to Harvard while serving to develop future leaders. Ideally, participating as a SAMI mentor will provide alumni with a new and exciting opportunity to discover additional fulfillment outside of the realm of their current personal and professional life.

Mentor Responsibilities:

The commitment to establishing and maintaining a nurturing, respectful relationship with a mentee can be significant. Oftentimes, mentees place enormous importance on their mentor's timeliness, reliability, and general caring nature. Creating this kind of relationship is far from a science; rather, it is more of an art that can take significant time and energy on the part of both participants. A commitment to open communication is necessary in order to develop and maintain the mentor-mentee relationship.

As a SAMI mentor, alums must understand that their mentee is counting on them to attend events, to arrive on time, to be responsive to calls, e-mails, and contact, and to make a sincere effort to adhere to the responsibilities that come with being a mentor. Mentors are asked to correspond weekly (via phone, e-mail, or in-person) with their mentee, and should plan to come to the HGSE campus 3-4 times for SAMI events during the school year.