Mentor Session 3 - To academic future and beyond

Much like a second game football game that is played within a string of games over a period of only a few days, the second meeting of this week that I had with my mentor ran the risk of suffering from informational substance fatigue. However, since the previous conversation was kept to a brief length that focused primarily on an apology and planning for future meetings.

This second meeting was thus able to go into much greater depth. We began talking about what had gone well during the school year and what had gone wrong during the year. As informed him that I felt my pursuit of greater involvement in school based activities had faltered, he encouraged me to not feel pressured to simply be involved in order to fill out a transcript or resume, but rather for the purpose of flourishing as a young adult that is seeking knowledge and understanding of how to live faithfully as a servant of God, both in everyday residential and work life. For my classes that I found myself succeeding in, my mentor asked me to differentiate between the classes that I was doing well in simply because of my commitment to getting good grades, and in which classes I was succeeding in due to my enjoyment and passion for the material and/or the field of study. For the classes that I lamented disillusion with, he asked me whether I felt that it was my effort, mental ability, presentation of the class, structure of the material, or other reason that I felt I was struggling. As I discussed my views in both regards to my favorite and least favorite classes, my mentor picked up on two key things that he then shared with me. Firstly, he believes that I experience my greatest academic fulfillment and success within business course and other courses that challenge me to switch between applying knowledge to smaller and larger topic canvases. Secondly, he believes that my enjoyment of classes largely boils down to the culture and structure of the classes that I take.

As we moved on to discussing my plans for the summer and the 2017-18 school year, my mentor encouraged me to invest myself more into the relationships with my peers and professors on campus. After hearing this suggestion, I happily informed him that my friends and I would be sharing and apartment, and have big plans in store, I got to witness the notorious smile of mentor that could bring joy to even the bleakest provincial settings. In addition, he was joyous to hear that I was hired for a paid internship that he wrote an online recommendation for. While I will never see what he wrote in that character recommendation letter, he is one of the select few people that I have met, that is willing and capable of being brutally honest, while seeing the very best in an individual.