We are meeting a lot of great educators in the Career and Tech Ed fields today! Looking forward to working with all of our new contacts.

Smart Futures attended the Pennsylvania School Counselor Conference this week to educate school counselors on our career education programs. We met a number of counselors, new to Smart Futures and current users, that are interested in using our resources to help students “Get real! About who they are, where they want to go and how to get there.” Thank you to all of the wonderful counselors that will implement our programs to help students build successful futures.

Congratulations to Megan Palovsky who was chosen to win the PA eMentoring Testimonial Competition.

Megan is an Account Coordinator for TrueSense Marketing where she coordinates and implements development strategies for non-profit organizations.

When Megan first heard of the PA eMentoring program she immediately thought “what do I have to offer high school students, I’m barely out of college myself and this is my first job- what do I know that they don’t?” After thinking about her choices she made after college, she decided she wanted to share with her mentees “some things I wish I had been told in high school to help better prepare myself for college and beyond”.

Megan was matched to three students during the PA eMentoring program and had three very different experiences. Once Megan began the activities, she not only felt her mentees enjoyed the activities, but she enjoyed and learned from the activities as well, “The activities not only showed the mentees the many options that were out there, but also gave me the opportunity to give them insight as a recent college grad about the massive amount of information and career choices available to them that wouldn’t normally be shown as options”.

Megan is still matched to two mentees who are finishing up their final activities in the program, “The only thing I wanted to gain from this experience was making a difference in one person’s life- even if it was giving them an option they wouldn’t normally give consideration to.”

Congratulations again to Megan Palovsky!

There is a lot of information about how to be an effective mentor, but what about being an effective mentee? Learning to accept mentoring can be just as strenuous as providing mentoring. The Mentee’s Guide to Mentoring* is an accessible book that offers practical advice for being a productive mentee. According to Amazon.com editorial reviews:

The Mentee’s Guide to Mentoring offers practical guidance in the art of establishing and maintaining productive interpersonal communication with mentors. Mentees who are knowledgeable about the dynamics of the one-to-one mentoring relationship – especially from the perspective of the trained mentor – will be in a stronger position to directly contribute to a more effective utilization of time and energy during their own participation in a mentoring program.

* Cohen, Norman. The Mentee’s Guide to Mentoring. HRD Press: 1999.

On Thursday April 22, 2010, YouthLINK, PA Career Link, Eastside Neighborhood Employment Center, YouthWorks, and urban Youth Action will join forces to sponsor the fourth Youth Career Fair at the Omni William Penn Hotel from 1:00 p.m.- 4:30 p.m. High school juniors and senior, freshman and sophomore college students, and other entry-level workers are encouraged to attend.

Youth will have the opportunity to meet hiring employers, post-secondary institutions, and experts from the workforce development sector. Each youth attendee will receive a career fair bag filled with gifts and have the chance to win door prizes!

We will be happy to answer any questions you might have and assist you in any way possible 412-390-2441.

Click on the link below to watch our PA eMentoring skit on the Smart Futures YouTube channel!

PA eMentoring Skit (YouTube Video)

UPMC employees partner with online mentoring program

Tuesday January 19, 2010

By Joe Symdo

Gina Monaco long had thought about becoming a mentor, but doubted she had the time and energy to do it.

When University of Pittsburgh Medical Center encouraged employees to begin mentoring high school students by e-mail, she jumped at the chance and quickly was paired with a local high school student interested in psychology.

“I signed up and didn’t give it a second thought,” said Ms. Monaco, who handles insurance reviews at UPMC’s Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic.

UPMC’s endorsement of PA eMentoring is a big boost to Smart Futures, the Downtown nonprofit group that launched the program last school year. The partnership with UPMC was announced last week.

UPMC has 50,000 employees, giving the mentoring the program the potential to reach thousands of additional students across the state, Smart Futures executive director David Mosey said. Also, because the UPMC work force is so varied, it can offer students guidance on numerous career choices, including the skilled trades and technical fields.

Already, at least 100 UPMC employees have signed up. Ms. Monaco, who has a bachelor’s degree in child development and a master’s in psychology, said the goal with her student will be to “just open her eyes to the possibilities” of a psychology career.

Each week, the student and adult complete an online exercise designed to set the stage for a career-related discussion. Students participate for 10 weeks and finish the program with a personalized college and career plan.

By the end of the school year, Mr. Mosey said, he hopes to have reached more than 1,000 students in dozens of schools across the region. He said he hopes to have about 150 employers in his network by then.

Mr. Mosey said the program helps students understand “who they are, where they’re going and how to get there.” Partly because online mentoring is convenient, many of the mentors stay on for another 10-week cycle with another student.

“You’re talking about two e-mails a week,” Mr. Mosey said.

Smart Futures still is seeking college students, workers and retirees to serve as mentors. Prospective mentors can sign up at www.pa-ementor.org.

Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10019/1029242-298.stm?cmpid=news.xml#ixzz0d4blawNM

Inside Higher Education                 

 January 4, 2010

http://www.insidehighered.com/   

Many discussions of efforts to diversify the faculty ranks include concerns about whether female and minority academics need mentors. Advocates for female and minority professors say that white men are more likely to learn informally from senior (male) colleagues about how to get ahead. Some skeptics dismiss these ideas, and suggest that the best scholarship gets published and the best academics rise through the ranks.

Academics who have had good mentors have over the years praised their impact, and those without them have talked about falling behind. But is there proof that mentoring matters in launching faculty careers — and that it could make a difference for faculty diversity?

A study presented in Atlanta Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association may be the first truly random sample to try to test the mentor impact — and the study may demonstrate that mentoring truly does matter.

The research tracks the careers of women who participated (and some who were turned away from participating) in a mentoring program sponsored by the AEA’s Committee on the Status of Women in the Economic Profession. The mentoring program connects junior female economists with senior faculty mentors for a two-day workshop held in conjunction with the economics association’s annual meeting. The workshops feature discussions about publishing and grant writing and offer critiques of a draft article or grant proposal. In the study, applicants to the program were randomly selected for participation or to be in the control group, and were told that there was not enough room in the program for all applicants.

Cohorts from 2004 and 2006 have now been tracked for five years and three years, respectively, and the study compares the female economists who received the mentoring and those who didn’t — women who were seen as otherwise having a similar range of abilities. Before participating (or not participating) in the study, those in the group receiving mentoring and in the control group showed no differences in the numbers of grants received or publications.

Comparing the participants and non-participants in the years since the mentoring took place, the study found significant gains for those who received mentoring in three key factors: total number of publications, total number of publications in “top tier” journals, and total number of federal grants won.

The study says that not enough time has passed to see if these achievements translate into higher rates of tenure and promotion. But the paper notes that, historically, the tenure rates for female economists have lagged those of men, and that publication and grants are key to receiving tenure. Some research, the paper says, suggests that mentoring may be particularly important in closing the gender gap in tenure rates. This research suggests that female economists lack the “research networks” of their male counterparts, and notes that even though co-authorship is common in the discipline, female economists are less likely to write pieces with colleagues than are men (even after controlling for publication rates).

— Scott Jaschik