SEM Provides a Mentor, a Guide, a Friend
By: Dana Farouk
@danahfarouk
In 2017, the Office of Strategic Enrollment Management (SEM) established a life mentoring program for faculty to assist and mentor students with finding their career paths and planning their future.
They also recently introduced entrepreneurial mentoring in response to students who requested assistance in becoming entrepreneurs.
“The main vision is to merge the students’ academic and personal lives to create self motivated intentional and inspirational future leaders,” said Director of the Academic Initiative and Mentoring Services Mai Younes.
Mentoring combines counseling with advising because it tackles all life challenges that students could be experiencing.
When they first started in spring 2017, they had 20 faculty mentors matched with 40 students. As of spring 2019, they reached 42 faculty mentors matched with almost 100 students.
They provide the mentors with the appropriate training through workshops and then manually match each student to the mentor that would be of most help to them based on the focus areas that they include in the application form.
The provost organizes an annual two day workshop for all the mentors to guide them into becoming more oriented in regards to the appropriate practices and techniques for being a genuine open-minded listener.
“The mix of faculty, alumni and entrepreneurial mentors is the unique aspect of the Life Mentoring Program here at AUC,” said Younes.
A great challenge is promoting the program in order to get more students involved. Not enough students are aware of it and its variety and that’s what they are trying to working on.
“We need ambassadors from the different entities in the student body to promote the life mentoring program because it really will make a difference in their current lives and their futures,” said Younes.
The program assists students with problems beyond their academic path and guides them through life after graduation.
Students have submitted anonymous responses to their mentoring sessions and explained that having someone that was frequently available to listen to them was very comforting.
“The mentor acts as an older, wiser, genuine friend,” Younes said.
Younes explained that the job of mentoring is fulfilling because it involves eagerness to support those who need it, whether it be personal, academic or psychological.
“We need to build a sense of belongingness in the students in terms of facilitating their journey and nurturing their potential in order to help them develop in all matters of their lives,” she added.
She also said that the alumni mentors volunteered to provide the students with genuine advice on what the world is like outside of AUC and to guide them into the future that they would enjoy.
“It is a great honor to be a part of AUC’s Life Mentorship Program, a small token of giving back to our glorious days at AUC,” said Marketeer Alumni Mentor ’97 Nadine Moussa.
The alumni were invited to mentor when the students expressed that they wanted a greater variety of services in the program.
Farida Kortam is one of the success stories to emerge from the life mentoring program.
She is a student who started her own fashion line after being in touch with Alumni Mentor Ghadeer Al Agabany who was a fashion consultant
“As an aspiring designer and someone who has wanted to open her business for a very long time, this program has helped me get into the fashion industry and has put me at the beginning of this line that i didn’t know how to get to,” Kortam said.
