Thousands of Problems Faced, Solved with One Mentor!

By Author: MENTit (MENTit Developer)
Affiliation: MENTit

Mentoring is broadly a new concept in India, a much-needed one and way more important than one thinks it is, especially for students. Mentors can have a tremendous impact on students' lives. Students should seek out mentors to help them with challenges or simply to have a system of support in their personal and professional lives. A mentor could be anyone you trust and go to for advice and assistance.

The person can be a professor, coach, friend, family or someone else. The importance of mentors in a student’s life is undeniable. Mentors, therefore, do play a major role in guiding, directing, and shaping a student’s present situation for future opportunities. A mentor has almost always existed in a person’s life; they just haven’t paid much attention to it to notice it.

Unfortunately, some people do not have such a figure in their life and are struggling to get through. This is where professional mentorship comes in. When students are appointed mentors in schools and other educational places it creates a huge impact on the mentee’s life as they now have someone to look up to when in crisis or in need of guidance. 

However, just appointing a mentor is not going to work unless the mentor gives in his best. The mentor needs to build up their mentees’ trust and provide them with a safe space for them to speak up and actually need to be there for them when they require help. A long-term healthy relationship needs to be maintained for the process of mentorship to be fruitful. 

 India with an immensely large population comes with a really high competition that every student has to face in their daily life which often leads to distress, anxiety, frustration, and all sorts of mental instability. Everyone wants to achieve the goals they have set for themselves but often don’t know how to achieve them or at times don’t even know what are the right goals for them. Some just go ahead with the herd mentality and then are disappointed and devastated when they do not achieve their desired goal.

Students in their teens are not exposed to struggles in life and worldly problems and often don’t take academic failures in a healthy manner, and turn to toxic options such as drugs or alcohol, which they think might help them calm their nerves. Some might be way deep into distress that they choose to take up drastic steps such as suicide which unfortunately has become very common in India.

Almost every engineering or medical college has had a case of suicide on their campus for the same reason as “academic pressure”. Most students face external pressure as well as peer pressure, family expectations, career pressure, and therefore it makes it difficult for students to approach their peers or parents and remain silent and try to work it out themselves. According to National Crime Bureau, every hour one student commits suicide in India, with about 28 such suicides reported every day [1]. Whereas, drug abuse has become absolutely normal among teenagers. 

Thus, youth mentoring programs are coming up in India for the prevention of such situations. Mentors truly get into youth development and provide interventions, positive outcomes, drug prevention, social skill development, improve academics and engage in extracurricular activities. Students are at their most vulnerable age during higher education and college years and without proper guidance and support, they might get harmed. Whereas when provided with the right mentors, they can overcome all such obstacles that they have been tackling in their life and can achieve their goals with mental stability.

It is seen that mentees strongly agreed that if they had a mentor who encouraged them to pursue their goals and dreams it would have been better than figuring out everything by themselves and feeling all alone and stressed out while having no idea on how to deal with their situations. People should start understanding that having a mentor is not a luxury but a necessity. From high school to undergrad to their first job mentors are hand holding their mentees beyond academic to career planning, deal with stress and find answers at every step in their early life. Mentoring is not limited to coaching or consulting. It is a holistic process that involves getting your mentee to open up to you and stick around their mentees until they have reached their goals. 

 Let's see what Sonali Karande Brahma from Pune shared in The Times of India article about her mentoring experience and how it helped her mentee reach her goal. 

 She says that mentoring according to her is all about nurturing the mentees and standing by them. She cites her case about her mentee who had taken design as her summer internship and it did not go as well as she hoped it would which be got her wondering if that was the right path for her career. Sonali mentored her through this face and helped her regain her confidence and guided her through her career path. She also added that, unlike coaches and consultants that tend to focus on only limited aspects, mentoring is a lifetime commitment. The focus is to guide students in the right direction so they reach that sweet spot which is the intersection of happiness and success [2]. 

 

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The views/opinions expressed in this blog by me as a MENTit user are my personal. MENTit or its promoters or other users may not share the same views or opinions as mine. If any copyright/trademark/patent/plagiarism/controversy issue emerges because of this article written by me, I, as an author, shall be the sole responsible for the consequences.

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Mentorship Description and need of the mentorship in everyone's life.