A good mentor according to UG students

What do you think is a good mentor? A good mentor is a professional friend. It’s somebody who you can level to but also knows the way within the university. It’s not a friend, as a normal friend. You have to feel comfort in that way. Yeah, I think that’s a good mentor. What a good mentor is– it’s almost a little bit like a good teacher, except a mentor provides different information than a teacher. A teacher gives information about subjects and a mentor gives information about the study or things around it, such as where to find your schedule, or how is your studying going, how are your grades.

I think a mentor should be someone whose students can easily engage with, someone who is approachable, who knows what students go through when they first come to university– the kind of questions that they have, and the insecurities perhaps as well, that someone that they feel they can approach their mentor without feeling that they should be ashamed or that they feel that they have stupid questions– someone who understands the students fully. Empathy is a really good place to start. Because if you’ve got empathy, then you can help translate your culture to somebody who might be suffering a little bit from culture shock.

Because when you first move to another country– even if you’ve visited it before– living in a country can be quite different. And what seems very natural to people who have lived their whole lives can be a steep learning curve if you haven’t. He has to be– has like kind of an open ear for his mentoring students, so he also has to feel. Sometimes people don’t say what they really need to what their problems are, so he also has to pay attention to how could I help without them asking? Because that’s what a mentor for me has to do. I think a good mentor is one of the guys, so it’s a student as well.

I’d say a mentor is there when he needs to be but, only then. And it’s– a hard aspect of being a mentor is knowing when to be there for a student when he needs to and not when he not needs them. I think a good mentor is somebody who you feel comfortable with approaching also by email or something. He’s really not like a teacher but more, a bit– not a friend of course– but closer to you.