I love going to a school as committed to providing quality education as Madison College is, however I feel as if something is missing: mentorship opportunities.

Mentoring can be as simple as a few email exchanges a week between a peer or a professional that has the experience and desire to help a person navigate the waters of the professional adult world. Or it can be an extensive and in person experience. Part of the trouble of finding a mentor is identifying what either party needs and wants out the experience.

Studies show that students who have ready access to mentorship opportunities succeed at a higher, even drastic rate as compared to students who do not.

I have had instructors here that I wish could mentor me, but I always fail to approach them. Usually it’s because I can’t come up with a reason good enough to ask them to devote time to my needs as a mentoree.

I have yet to come across a professor or instructor here that was not always incredibly busy and hard working as it is. Mentoring takes resources; time and energy and money. How many two or four year colleges in this country offer mentoring programs? Not many according to the surface web, though there seems to be an increase in interest in how to effectively provide mentorship programs and opportunities, such as peer mentoring.

Last semester a professor had to drop a her section of her curriculum that would have been spent with her giving us a “radical check-in.” Because she had taken on another course to teach, she didn’t have time to sit down with each of us for an hour and go over our check-in with our academic lives. I know some of us in the class really felt at a loss.

Maybe the answer is simple. Maybe you just have to go for it. It would be nice, however, if the school could act as some sort of facilitator between would be mentors and mentorees.