Interview With a Mentor

June 23, 2021

Jonathan Tick contributed to this post.

Here at Gii, one of our more personal and private programs is our Virtual Mentorship program.  In it, we focus on providing students with the opportunity to work with mentors one on one in order to formulate and work towards their academic and career goals.  All done in order to provide help for communities who are not privileged to have these kinds of resources.

To give us a little bit of insight into what goes on in the mentorship program, one of our mentors, Barbara Kristof, was kind enough to answer a few questions about her experience working with a mentee.  Barbara has had a 20-year career of publishing high school textbooks and has taught both English Second Language (ESL) classes, as well as tutored at Hoft University for 10 years.  

Barbara explained that her mentee, Ikra, was a high school sophomore from NYC whose family had immigrated from Bangladesh, with plans to get into the field of medicine for her higher education.  

Among the skills that they focused on during their time together, preparing for the jump from high school to college and higher education was their primary focus.  For Barbara, preparing Ikra for the process of college applications involved many steps in order to prepare her for success.  This included the process of writing good college admissions essays as well as narrowing down what profession Ikra wanted to pursue during their time together.  After that, Barbara spent time preparing Ikra for job interviews, teaching things such as interview etiquette, and practicing said etiquette during one on one interviewing sessions to ensure that Ikra would have the knowledge on what to say and how to act when in the middle of a job interview.  

As a final note, despite some conversational challenges that Barbara faced when interacting with and teaching her mentee, Barbara notes the experience as a positive one and she hopes that the mentoring has helped Ikra in her future endeavors in education and beyond.  While she laments some early struggles in figuring out how best to mentor Ikra,, she says that in the future she would be happy to work with the program again in some capacity.