I cannot begin to emphasize the role of a mentor in my student life. Not only has having a mentor helped me choose better career options, but it has also helped me deal with the numerous challenges that my life has thrown at me.

Education is more than the virtual passage of education. It is the learning and grasp over the principles that needs to be embedded into a student’s mind. And for this learning to happen, it is essential to establishing trust and communication between the educator and the student.

A mentor can be a guide and a friend which a student needs in their life. Mentors understand students in ways that educational institutions, professors, and parents do not. Students experience emotional, physical, academic, and mental stress during their school-university years.

This strain can sometimes stifle a student’s overall growth and development. This can lead to a drop in grades and extracurricular activities, which can emotionally and mentally break a student. The presence of a guide or mentor, who can provide adequate one on one mentorship and a career guidance counselor, can significantly help students in crafting effective answers to these problems. This can lead to improved student outcomes, when conducting assessment of learning, while also ensuring their happiness and satisfaction.

Having a mentor can have a life-changing impact on the lives of our students. Students these days have abundant stress in their lives. It can be intimidating for them to tackle all these issues on their own, including the stress and pressure of excelling in academics and performing beautifully in extracurricular activities. This is where the role of a mentor comes into the picture where they can guide students with the essentially required one on one mentorship.

Not only can a mentor guide the students but also help them manage through the challenges of life that are thrown at them. A mentor understands students’ personalities and helps them assess their short-term and long-term goals and thus prove to be an excellent career guidance counselor.

For instance, let us consider the following example.

Matt is very academically driven and focused. Mentors can push Matt to achieve his goals, short-term and long-term. This type of mentorship can prove very valuable to him. Students will have someone to guide them through any obstacles, while they craft their ways out of these problems on their own.

Now, Samantha is not that academically motivated. So the mentor must lay the groundwork, starting with motivating that student from level 0. The mentor must understand all the issues that she may have (emotionally, physically, or mentally) to divulge into the working of this child’s brain to comprehend what she faces while studying or performing any form of career-defining activity.

Thus, from the above example, it becomes exceedingly evident that the role of a mentor becomes very versatile and even more challenging as the needs and wants of every other student are exceedingly different. Mentors challenge students to push their limits emotionally, physically, and mentally whilst maintaining a balance with health.

What are the roles and responsibilities of a mentor?

1) Understanding the psychology of students, and communicating with parents and students to bridge the gap between them to understand where the students’ life is heading.

2) Agent: The student knows the mentor will go to bat for him or her. The mentor removes obstacles, but only after the student has made a convincing attempt. And the mentor is careful to avoid spoon-feeding, which stunts the development of independence.

3) A good coach motivates the players to win. Knowing when to offer encouragement. When to push. And when to pause and take a break. A mentor must push for action while tolerating inaction — a cause of considerable tension in the mentor. Likewise, a mentor recognizes that it is far easier to give a lecture than to guide a student in how to do it.

4) Handling Failure with grace and talking and helping students through bad times

5) Developing confidence and making the students independent

6) Advisor and counselor: The students need a sounding board and reality check to help refine ideas and gain clarity of thought. Being older, the mentor provides the missing experience — been there, done that. The student does not need someone to pave the road but needs help in becoming a better navigator. The mentor will not try to personally solve the student’s problems but helps the student craft his or her own solution — to become self-reliant.

7) The mentor teaches the students the technical skills unique to their field of research. The mentor guides the students in how to read and understand efficiently and how to reason from first principles.

In the modern era, we need to take the role of a mentor and develop a long-term relationship with all our students. The quality of content available online for free, and platforms like YouTube with so many talented content creators, have revolutionized the whole idea of learning.

For example, as a mathematics instructor, I can teach my students in the best possible way I know of. But there can be so many educators who are much better at creating and delivering the same content. As educators, we need to help students benefit from the unprecedented learning revolution that has happened in the last decade.

We need to understand that learning is more about what happens inside their minds and less about what happens outside. So rather than just focusing on creating content with amazing animations, narration, etc., we must also focus on supporting the students to figure out the learning methodology that suits them the best.

We must encourage them in their failures, keep them grounded in their success so that they can achieve their dreams, conduct a frequent and thorough assessment of learning, and become confident, empathetic, social, financially independent, and happy.

The simple fact is if the students are motivated and know how to approach things in the right way, they have more than enough resources available for free that can help them in achieving their short-term and long-term goals.

We need to participate in different aspects of students’ lives, be it music, movies, sports, culture, environment, social media, and personal issues that they are facing. Once we start understanding students from different perspectives, only then will we be able to motivate them and help them realize their full potential.