What is a Mentor
A Mentor is a person with vast knowledge and experience, who helps students and young professionals achieve their personal goals and advance in their professional careers.
The ideal Mentor is a senior professional who is experienced, knowledgeable, supportive, focused, caring, open-minded, and empathetic. In addition, ideal Mentors share similar values and goals with their students and young professionals and can serve as role models.
Perhaps the best definition of a Mentor is: "An older person from whose hindsight a young person acquires foresight."
As an international Mentor, you will interact with a young man or woman from another country and culture and your mentee will benefit enormously from your experience and generosity. Thanks to you, your mentees will acquire knowledge and wisdom that go beyond their own chronological age.
But this is not a one-way street.
In turn, Mentees give their Mentors the reciprocal gifts of:
validation of their professional career
fulfillment and sense of usefulness
trust and confidence
respect and admiration
stimulus and new ideas
memory retrieval and fresh knowledge
inspiration and enthusiasm
strength and energy
help and collaboration and, especially, hope for the future of global health and human development
Ideally, the ultimate goal and highest reward for both the Mentee and the Mentor is the achievement of the Mentee's goal: a new job or a promotion, an advanced academic degree, a paper for publication, a proposal for funding, a research project, a consultancy for a prestigious institution, or any other major accomplishments that the Mentee, with the help of his or her Mentor, wanted and worked for during and after the program. And we can assure you that you’ll be proud of the success of your mentee.
In summary, this is what Mentors do
Transfer knowledge
Probe thinking
Trigger action
Share experience
Enhance self-confidence
Ignite passion
Give direction
Speed understanding
Transmit wisdom
Point out options
Strengthen reasoning
Help you succeed
How to become a Mentor
Mentors are selected on the basis of their professional success, communication skills, generosity, empathy, and real-life experience. We recruit the majority of our outstanding Mentors by personal invitation through the LinkedIn network. New Mentors referred and recommended by current Mentors and former Mentees are accepted as a matter of fact but are still interviewed as part of the admission’s process.
A small proportion of our prospective Mentors (less than 15%) contact us directly via the Internet and are accepted according to their qualifications and after a screen-to-screen session. Our senior professionals don't receive any monetary compensation for mentoring but all of them seem to enjoy and appreciate the personal reward of feeling and being helpful to our younger colleagues.