Elevating Individuals Through Mentorship
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Tina Fox sat down with real college students and asked them to write their questions about school and life in sticky notes. Perusing through their submissions, she finds out that young people desperately need proper guidance in determining the next step they should take to achieve success in the future. Tina explains what students must do to find the right mentors who can lead them to genuine joy, purpose, and fulfillment. She also discusses why mentorship does not need to be overly formal but simply authentic, relatable, and deeply meaningful.
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Everyone, welcome to the show. I am Tina Fox, the founder and CEO of TERN Mentoring. These sticky notes behind me are not decor. They are actually from our conversations with real college students. With each one of these notes is a worry, a hope, a question. Honestly, they are important questions for which many of these students are still seeking answers. I have noticed that when a student is in school, and they are still in post-secondary, whether they are a first year, fourth year, or fifth year, a student’s sphere of influence is typically what I call the three P’s. It is the professors, their peers, and their parents.
Professors absolutely care. They do an amazing job with all the things that they have to manage on campus, but their bandwidth is real. They might have hundreds of students they are dealing with. They might also be doing research reports. They have got other activities that they volunteer for on college campuses, like business fraternities and different areas that they are trying to connect with for themselves.
The peers are often in the same boat as the students who are seeking these answers to the big questions of their lives. Parents, I am a parent. We give advice, but it does not always land or apply. I think the statistics are that once a student gets to be somewhere in their early teens, they are almost done listening to advice from parents, and they are really seeking it from outside sources.
Students are often surrounded by many people, and yet they still feel alone in these big questions. Why do I hear these real conversations? What is my vantage point? Because of my role as a public speaker, university guest lecturer, and former College of Business Board Chair, I have had the privilege of meeting and connecting with thousands of students in college.
Sometimes I am waiting to speak, I might be sitting in a public space filled with different students from all over campus, and I get to overhear students processing their real lives. Oftentimes, they are in banter, talking to each other, but I can tell that the guidance is often missing because everyone is in the same boat. They are all trying to figure it out at the same time. If you were a student, you probably remember those days when you were pitching ideas back and forth, and there was a lot of wondering and not a lot of clarity.
I was recently on a college campus, and I had about twenty minutes in between meetings. I was listening to a group of students who were right next to me, and I was just doing some work. I heard a fifth-year student who was really talking about networking and having to carry a lot of what she had been doing on her own. She was putting herself through school. Her time was stretched. She was working a couple of jobs. She was exhausted.
She did not really have any warm intros, yet she was moving herself to the stage to pick up her diploma. She also mentioned to her friend that she is someone who comes from a large family. Her parents did not have the means to afford all of the children’s college. They did the best that they could, but it was really up to them to figure it out with scholarships and loans and to work in order to get themselves through school. Hence, she was a fifth-year student because she had to do this in pieces.
Her friend was sitting there, and I could tell that he was definitely being a great listener to her. In her comments, “If I had to do this all over again, I would have done a little bit more as far as getting involved in activities on campus. I definitely would have sought out more adults in my life. I would have sat in on professor hours in their office hours to find out from them some of the things that I still have questions about.” She says, “I feel like the hours through the hourglass are just running so quickly. I feel like I missed an opportunity.”
In her friend’s listening, I could tell that he was processing what she was saying because he still had another year left at school. Her recognition and failure in networking, as she stated, was something that she regretted at that present moment. He was listening and processing. I felt really bad because I know what that feels like to have all of that work and yet still feel like something is missing in this next transition period of life. For her and all these other students who may be feeling the same way, the network gap is not a talent gap.
This is not because of something that they have or have not done. They are busy doing things all the time. Students, their schedules, if you ever look at a student’s schedule between work and extracurricular activities and all of their classes, getting to and from the campus, it is a very busy schedule. As I was listening to this fifth-year student, I was thinking that your success is not only about what you know, which is actually the comment that her friend had made.
He had said, “It’s not about what you know, it’s about who you know.” She said, “Yes, you’re right about that.” There really was not anything beyond that as to how you should get to know people. It is about who you know, but it is also about who can help you translate what you know into an opportunity. This is where mentorship could be that key in providing another P to the original three of parent, peer, and professor.
You could have another person and a professional who are coming into your life to support you in these important questions and to augment your network. Over the years, when I go in and speak to audiences of students, the talks that seem to resonate the most are about my failures. I often tell a story about my major failure, literally, I picked the wrong major. I tell that story because I hear many students who have tremendous fear about having wasted their time on choosing a major that they are not so inclined to see themselves doing work in after school, but it is too late to change. It is too much money.
They cannot tell their parents about this because they know how much their parents have sacrificed in order to get them into school and pay for it. There is a lot of pressure on these students. I shared with them. When I was a student at my alma mater, I had chosen the lane of business, and I was thinking maybe marketing management. I had not quite figured it out yet.
Of course, you have to take all these prerequisites when you are going into a major. One of the prerequisites I had to take was accounting. It turns out I was absolutely terrible at accounting. I failed the class. What is interesting is that I was not used to failing classes. I was used to being a very good student, but I just was not getting it.
I was not figuring this out. I tell the students that although I failed that class, it made me ask new questions about, “What should I be looking at? What are my talents and skills?” I was still a sophomore. I was able to go and sit down and talk to my advisor. He gave me great advice. He was like, “Do you feel as though you still need to continue in business? What do you want to do in business?” At the time, I was not quite sure. He said, “Why don’t we get you into communications? Why don’t we get you into something that is a degree in which you seem to be able to excel in interpersonal connections and communication?” I said, “That sounds really interesting.”
When I started to float over to that side of campus, I found my people, and I really enjoyed my major after that. I often also tell students that the real fact of the day is that less than 27% of us who graduated in a major actually do work that is directly aligned to our major. Life has its way of bringing you around and through and back and up and over, and you end up where you end up.
Skills can always be learned. Reinvention of self is really important. They find value in that because it gives them hope. That is a big job of a mentor is to just give hope because not everything ends at graduation. It is really where life begins. I also share a story of a song that I think is hysterical. There is a group called AJR, and in that song, it says, “A hundred bad days means a hundred good stories and a hundred good stories make you interesting at parties.” When I heard that years ago, I thought, “That’s right. We often tell the more interesting stories are the ones where we crashed and burned, but we are still here to tell about it. We are able to share what that experience was like in our lives.”
For the mentors who may be listening, what have you experienced in life that has come to serve you in knowledge? Those are the gold nuggets that students are digging for. Sometimes they just do not know how to ask. When you are authentic and you lower your defenses, it really opens up into a real relationship with students.
Another story I am getting from many of these Post-it notes is, “I don’t feel confident to talk to strangers.” I hear it not just from the students, I hear it from both sides. I hear it from both the alumni mentors and I hear it from the student mentees. Interestingly, the mentors are worried about what they are going to share and what they are going to ask.
The students are worried about, “What am I going to say? How am I going to sound professional?” The best part about mentorship is that it is not an interview. It is just a conversation with a new person who can bring fresh insights and perspectives. We do have a solution for this at Tern Mentoring. We keep it very simple because we do not believe it needs to be overly complicated, but just a practical takeaway for people who are wondering, “What am I going to say? What am I going to ask?”
Three questions can get us through many different conversations. The first question that I asked myself when I was going back to speak to a group of college students was, “What did I wish I had known in college?” That list is long. I had to pare it down and make it more relevant, but I am sure that there were many things as a mentor that we wished we had known in college. The second question is what is something that you have learned the hard way?
Talking about failures really helps bring down the walls and opens it up to a larger conversation. Another question that I think could really help move things along and provide some momentum is, “If you were me, what would you do in the next 30 days?” These questions, students can ask that question by sharing with themselves as to what they are dealing with. If they are not sure what the next step is, asking a mentor, “What would you do in the next 30 days?” would maybe help provide some level of guidance and direction.
If you are not sure what to do next, ask a mentor what you should accomplish in the next 30 days. Share on XWhat is this whole mentorship thing for? It is a place where students can ask questions that their peers cannot answer. I talked to you about the fifth-year student. She was sharing her regrets, but he really did not have anything to offer her as to where to go or what to do. He was definitely taking it in. The parents may have already answered. I know that I have given unsolicited advice to my children, but I also know that they cannot remember everything that I said, nor do they even listen to everything that I say.
Parents, we are doing the best we can, but sometimes it is just falling on deaf ears. The professors that are out there, again, these three P’s, the peers, the parents, and the professors. Professors are there for students, but they could also be serving hundreds of students per semester. Mentorship air support is not a bad thing for university students.
The role of a mentor is really to show up because they can and they are willing to help. That is the beauty of my having the privilege to work with many mentors, is that these are people who have just gone before, and they want to serve a version of their younger self. It is as pure as it gets. As several students I recently dined with stated, “The other thing about mentors is I come to realize after meeting with them and talking to them, they’re just people too.”
It really has helped me not feel stressed out about being in a job interview situation or having to take a test in a class. It is really just about having a conversation with another human. Students were starting to recognize that although they might have felt a little uncomfortable in this scenario of matching them with a mentor, they felt very comfortable after they had gone through the program. Sometimes, the most powerful thing is not necessarily the advice itself.
It is just listening so that someone can be heard. That is where many students have found a sense of belonging in their mentorship relationship is that they just felt heard, and they felt like they belonged to a larger community. My message to students in all of this is you are not alone, and you do not have to have it all figured out. You just need to take it one step at a time. Life is in the living, and it is in the learning. You have been learning a lot.
Just stay curious, ask a bunch of questions, and keep moving forward. My dream as a founder is that you know I am working really hard to try to do my best to help you. My dream as a founder of Tern Mentoring is to connect with your university leaders and with your alumni so that you not only graduate with a diploma, but you are provided a mentor in this journey from collegiate to career.
My message to you, mentors out there, mentorship does not need to be a lifetime commitment. It does not need to be overly formal. I had been asked to be a mentor to students as I was going to classes and meeting up with different students. Part of the reason I started Tern was that there are many students who want mentors, and I am only one person.
Being able to live my legacy through mentorship, I found that there were others who wanted to do the same. I created a space for all of this to come together in a very practical way, but it does not need to be overly formal, and you do not have to have all the answers as a mentor. What students truly want is they want to be heard, and they want to know what they said mattered.
Mentorship does not need to be overly formal. Mentors do not need to have all the answers. You just need to listen to your mentee and let them know that everything they say matters. Share on XThat is a human condition, to be honest with you. They also want someone to bounce ideas off of. Oftentimes, I am talking to many young students who have great big ideas, and as a mentor, I have learned that their great big ideas spur more great big ideas in me. They just have a different way of looking at things. They think faster, they were born in the age of tech all the time, and now they are having to deal with the cutting edge of AI, and they are going to be leveraging AI far more than generations previous to them.
They are just a great source of knowledge, but they are also seeking a source of knowledge. What we bring to them is something unique and different in our own journey. They are also seeking a connection that they do not find in online feeds, where many times that is where they often spend hours connecting. They want something that is a little bit more real and tangible.
We are not anti-AI, but at the same time, we are pro-human, and mentorship gives us that opportunity to be pro-human. If you are not sure how to connect, or if you want to discuss how you, as an alumnus, may be able to engage with students at your alma mater, you can always contact us at info at TERNMentoring.com. Until the next episode of the show, keep moving, keep asking. By all means, keep connecting. Those sticky notes that are behind me are not problems. They are potential, and they are waiting for you to help. Have a great one. Chat with you soon.
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