Be a Mentee! Applications Open for 2024 Vic Alumni Mentorship Program
By Joe Howell
Registration for the 2024–25 session of the Victoria Alumni Mentorship Program begins on Monday, July 29. Now in its fourth year, the program is designed to help recent alumni of Victoria College discuss career options with Vic alumni mentors who are a bit further on in their career journeys. Young alumni can benefit from the guidance of someone with relevant experience and interests in navigating the job market or whether to pursue graduate studies, says Meghan Junke, mentorship co-ordinator and alumni liaison in the Office of Alumni Affairs & Advancement.
“They may be finishing their undergraduate degree and trying to figure out what comes next, or they may have been in the workplace for a few years and are wondering if it’s time to look to move up or to move on,” she says. “Or they could just be in a new phase of their career where they’re in more of a leadership role, and are looking for guidance on managing people and bigger projects.”
The one thing mentees have in common is a desire to learn from Vic alumni who are further along in their journeys post-Vic, says Junke.
Andrea Davidson Vic 1T6 participated in the program last year. At the time she applied to be a mentee she had just defended her PhD in children’s literature at the University of Antwerp.
“I felt so lucky that my PhD supervisor gave me one year to work at the same university teaching,” she says. “But I didn’t know what I would do after that one year, especially living abroad. I wasn’t sure when I would move back to Canada or how to plan a career around that.”
Davidson was paired with mentor and fellow Vic alumna Arpita Ghosal, who has a PhD in English from the University of Toronto, teaches with the TSDB and is the founding editor of SesayArts Magazine. Though the two live on different continents, they formed a close friendship over video calls. Davidson says Ghosal opened her eyes to “opportunities that you just don’t know about until you get a bit of life experience.”
For her part, Ghosal says there were moments she wasn’t sure who was mentoring whom. “It’s been an absolutely magical pairing,” she says. (Look for their full story in the Fall/Winter ‘24 edition of Vic Report, coming later this year.)
This year, Vic alumni who graduated between 2015 and 2024 are eligible to become mentees. Mentorship roles are open to all Victoria College graduates. Designed for flexibility, program participants are encouraged to meet five times by phone or video call between November 2024 and April 2025.
To find out more about the Victoria University Mentorship Program, visit here. To apply, please complete the Mentee Application Form or Mentor Application Form by Friday, Aug. 16, 2024, and send it to Meghan Junke, mentorship co-ordinator and alumni liaison, at meghan.junke@utoronto.ca. You can also email her for more information or reach her on LinkedIn.