Actua’s National Mentorship Program connects participants to youthful, inspiring mentors who share their personal stories while leading activities or making presentations on their related fields. Actua mentor events often provide youth with their first opportunity to meet “real-life” scientists and engineers. These personal interactions result in a demystification of science fields and the dispelling of common associated stereotypes. You may even find yourself reimagining who belongs in STEM, and expanding your mind about the diversity within STEM professions.

This module is designed to help you understand the value of mentorship experiences for the youth, the network and for you as an undergraduate instructor. This module also provides opportunities to reflect on the skills and experiences you can gain throughout the planning and execution of mentor and role model engagement events. Planning, coordination, teamwork, professionalism and risk management are all skills associated with leading mentor events that can be developed or strengthened. By completing this module, you will have a framework of how to deliver a successful mentor event and ensure you are fully prepared to leverage the opportunity to its full potential value.

With all of the guidelines provided in this module, please be sure they match your own network member programs protocols.

1. Introduction (10 minutes)
2. Why Engage Mentors (10 minutes)
3. Recruiting Mentors (10 minutes)
4. Who can Mentor? What does a Mentor Event look like? (15 minutes)
5. How to Set-up a Mentor Event (10 minutes)
6. Running a Mentor Event (10 minutes)
7. Completing a Mentor Event and Next Steps (10 minutes)

In this module instructors will;

• Develop an understanding of the benefits of role models and mentors to your program, participants, national network and personal development. 
• Explore different models of mentorship engagement including; virtual live mentorship, virtual pre-recorded mentorship, and in-person mentorship.
• Learn the clear steps and key aspects to inviting, orienting, hosting, and thanking a mentor to result in a positive experience for the mentor, the youth, and other important stakeholders.

Communication

• Practicing formal and clear communications with mentors, role models and program directors
• Being proactive (e.g understanding and executing logistics planning for mentor needs, and being able to mitigate these needs independently)

Building Networks

• Seeking out, communicating with, and coordinating the engagement of  mentors and role models
• Understanding that building the mentorship story (e.g Social Media, reporting) and sharing these success stories is a larger part of the national network, and future opportunities for event and speaker coordination 
• Develop meaningful relationships and networked connections

Teamwork and Collaboration  

• Working as a team to plan and prepare for mentors
• Working with mentors to help accentuate their strengths and best models for being engaged

Self-Awareness  

• Identifying own strengths in facilitation support 
• How you present yourself when a mentor is engaged (and all the time)

To begin this module, consider your responses to the following questions. If you are working through this module in a group with other instructors you can use these reflection questions to have a group discussion.

• Who is a role model to you and why?
• What can mentorship consist of? What does it look like in practice?
• When you were a younger student, who would you have liked to hear from about STEM or future careers?