 Having
a mentor can help university students and professionals at all experience
levels with objective guidance that can help chart a career path. Mentors can
help you make the most of your education and help ease the transition
from school to work. And, working with a mentor during the early part of
a career is an excellent way to explore career path options within your
field. Mentors can pass along their
own career experiences, help you meet and interact with other professionals,
share new approaches to the work done in your field,
and help keep you up-to-date on new techniques or industry segments. Both students and mentors benefit from the
relationship.
In selecting a mentor it is important to be sure you'll both have the
time to communicate, and that each can be honest about any situation.
Trust is key to a successful mentoring relationship. Sometimes a
common friend or cohort is a good way to identify a mentor, and other
times it may be necessary to explore professional organizations or
national or regional mentoring programs to identify a mentor for you.
 Online
Resources
Many professional
organizations offer mentoring programs to help connect students or young
professionals with a mentor in their field. An example is the
ASME E-Mentoring Program. Universities often also coordinate
mentoring programs. An examples can be found at
Wright State
University's website and through Dartmouth College's
Women in Science Project. The following sites also offer resources on mentoring:
Career Cornerstone Center Profile Excerpts
The following excerpts from Cornerstone profiles address the value of
mentoring:
 Anne
J. Gorczyca, P.E.
Assistant Area Construction Manager
Massachusetts Highway Department
Boston, MA
"I have a great deal of
support from the two managers I work for, my manager and our director of
construction and I consider them mentors, people I can sit down and talk
to and get feedback. They even volunteer feedback to me and I think that
has made my job here and my transition to a management role so much
easier, having people who support you and are there as a resource."
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 Carlton
S. Serrette, E.I.T.
Project Engineer
Malcolm Pirnie, Inc.
White Plains, NY
"I have a mentor, my
supervisor. And right now there are a couple of junior engineers below me
that I mentor, so I try to teach them things that happened over the few
years that I've been working. So yes, there are certain types of
mentorship, you're not left out there to hang and dry, you're always given
someone to help you along the way."
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 Todd
Edgington
Systems Engineer
Genentech
San Francisco, CA
"Through my career
I've actually been kind of lucky. I've had a mentor at every step. In San
Diego, it was my boss. She was a chemical engineer, and she brought me
along, taught me, and gave me my first taste of programming PLCs, which
are programmable logic controllers. In my second job, I worked for a
17-year veteran in instrumentation and controls, and he was fantastic. He
taught me quite a lot about what makes very good Level I control, PID
loops, and things like that. Now here at Genentech, fortunately, I have
another great boss who is very competent at the actual software
engineering. He also has a strong HVAC background, which is heating,
ventilation, and air conditioning. The systems that control those are all
automated, and we're getting into the design of that software as well."
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 Thomas
Bean
Corporate Counsel
Lucent Technologies
Holmdel, NJ
"I think once you go
to work, you find that mentors are available and very important. I had a
number of people throughout my career show me the ropes and kind of
explain to me how things work and how to go about solving new kinds of
problems that I hadn't grappled with before, that they had grappled with.
So I would suggest it's very helpful to sort of hitch yourselves to the
rising stars and coattails of others who've gone before you, and that you
can learn quite a bit from them that'll be helpful to you in your career."
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 Deborah
Rech
Food Engineer
Thomas J. Lipton Company
Englewood Cliffs, NJ
"When I first started,
I did have a mentor. He was in the food industry for about 25 years. He
had basically seen it, done it, and he was very helpful at providing
direction for the experiments. He didn't really list things out: Do this,
do that, do this. I would set up my own design and he would emphasize a
certain area to work in. So he was very helpful."
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