Even when being confident and ambitious, it could be really difficult to understand what career path you would like to pursue and, once you found it, it is often challenging to identify how to maximize your opportunities.

That is why it is extremely useful to have a mentor that has already experienced the challenges a mentee is facing. The mentor could provide tips on how to start your dream career (if you already have one) or assist a mentee in understanding what she really wants to do with her future. Furthermore, the mentee and the mentor can plan short term goals such as obtaining a summer internship for the next year.

A mentor supports you on your personal development. She should push a mentee in improving on several levels. Moreover, the mentor does will not oblige the mentee to follow the same career path she pursued. Instead, she will try to provide several challenges with the mentee's personal improvement as the end goal.

It is important to have multiple perspectives. For example, among your friends, all of them could be looking to have the same career objectives. Maybe that is not the right road for everyone but, to be aware of that, you would need to have a different perspective at your disposal that can question the career plan you decided to pursue.

Furthermore, the people you usually hang out with in your university are generally of similar age or a little older. Our mentors are adults and professionals, thus a mentoring relationship with them could spark a long-term vision for your career.

A mentor will be assigned based on the preferences the mentee has filled out during the application process. That is why, we encourage to specify what your long-term objectives are. However, we also suggest not to worry too much if you don't have any long-term objectives yet, the mentoring programme is also useful to clear your long-term career vision.

A mentor will be assigned for each mentee who will be assisted for at least a year. Nonetheless, United Italian Societies encourages to build a personal relationship that can last in the long-term, for example until the completion of the mentee's studies. The efforts required would be a minimum of 1h call every two months.

Each mentoring relationship is unique and it will be up to the mentee and mentor to commit in making it flourish. Nonetheless, there are some general guidelines that you can follow to start a successful mentoring relationship.

- Agree on a plan before the programme starts: when to have a call, what the calls frequency will be, what platform to use: in person meetings, via phone, video call, etc...

- Get in touch at least once every two months, with a 10 months cycle of: introduction meeting, checking of mentee's progress, final results.

- Let the objectives be clear from the start: what are the 2 or 3 objectives the mentee wants to pursue this year?

- Write a timeline of the mentee's objectives.

- Before each call with the mentor, write a list of objectives to discuss, so that you can optimize your time at best.

- Do not let what was discussed during the call to be forgotten. Instead, try to dig deeper on the themes discussed during the call in the weeks ahead.

Steps:

1. First of all, try to define a list of objectives. Do not worry if that turns out to be challenging, your mentor will help you during the introductory meeting.

2. During the first meeting, mentee and mentor will align and discuss the mentee's objectives.

3. Continuing the mentoring relationship: meet regularly and decide on the next steps to pursue together with the mentor. Remember to write down the next steps on a document.

4. Follow up: both the mentor and mentee constantly assess the relationship's efficacy; the feedback is essential to have a successful programme!