Connecting Alumni-Mentors and College Students Online

​

The Annapolis Trust alumni mentor College freshman program guides students to meet virtually with alumni for help with career interests and internships.

 

 

The Annapolis Trust is changing its focus like many other scholarship programs by pivoting to engaging our alumni with our first year students .

The coronavirus has forced us to be creative to address needed mentoring services and activities to move online with this new initiative. early this year, career activities were no exception. While we will continue offer our traditional volunteer of face-to-face mentoring . Our goal will be expand our services by connecting alumni with our freshman address the social ties of students, while addressing Careers and Life Planning (CLP) Strategy to improve their college experience. Our Alumni Association (AA) will systematically harnessed technology to build connections between alumni and current students in an online internship program. A plus is that in the program we can transcend geographical barriers and involve overseas alumni, such as those in the United States and the UK.

STRUCTURE OF THE ONLINE MENTORSHIP PROGRAM

This experience is essential for students, so we made participation in the program mandatory .

 

The mentorship program consisted of a kickoff event, which all participants are required to attend; virtual meetups between mentors and mentees; online alumni sharing sessions; and job shadowing and internship opportunities.

Recruiting mentors. Invitations will go out in late august by email to alumni who had graduated within the last 3 years to serve as mentors. The Alumni Association mobilized its network to recruit mentors from different generations of the alumni community and also extended the invitation to past mentors.

​

Our goal is to recruit 20 mentors onboard—around one-fourth of the number of student participants. We will hold a briefing session online to explain the details of the program to mentors, providing them with an opportunity to mingle virtually with each other, and to shed light on the characteristics of Generation Z.

​

Matching mentors with mentees. The matching exercise will follow next. To maximize interactions between the alumni and the students. Our organizing committee determine the ideal mentor-mentee ratio to a one to two or three We also decided that career interest would be a factor in group allocation. We will send a Google Form to the students and gathered information about their preferences for job sectors and professions, including accounting, banking, engineering, marketing, law, and medicine. The same questions will be sent in the Google Form that the Alumni Association will send to mentors to ensure that the information on that form was aligned with the information collected in the mentee survey.