2008 - Marketing Educators' Association

Two-thirds of the students had a mentor before they
took the class. A little over a third of this group used
current or former employers as mentors while a
quarter had other business professionals serve in
this role. Interestingly, current and former professors
were as likely to be a mentor as relatives.
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Assignment Evaluation
After the students had turned in their mentor
assignment report and e-mails, we asked for
anonymous evaluations of the assignment.
Students performed the evaluation before they
received a grade on the assignment.
All of the students thought the assignment was
worthwhile although a few (3 of 23) were a bit
equivocal on the value. The positive view of the
requirement was reflected in a near unanimous
agreement that the mentor assignment should
continue to be part of the class. Students perceived
the assignment was valuable because of the career
advice and business information they received.
These responses are again a likely reflection of the
purposes of the mentoring assignment since
students were required to ask their assigned mentor
career and course topic-related questions.
When asked for suggestions for improving the
assignment, about half of the students had no
suggestions. When considering the suggestions
given, there was equal interest in selecting rather
than being assigned a mentor and an equal number
wanted to interact with the mentor on a more
personal level with face-to-face meetings or with
phone calls. These two suggestions may reflect
some students wanting some or more of the
psychosocial benefits as well as the career-related
value from their mentors.
Mentor Evaluations
All mentors were thanked in an e-mail from the
professor for their participation. In this “thank you” email,
mentors were also given the option to provide
feedback on the assignment workload for them, level
of insightfulness of student questions, sufficiency/
adequacy of number of exchanges provided by the
assignment, if they learned anything about this
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generation of students, and if they learned anything
about themselves during the process. Eight of the 23
mentors provided detailed feedback.
They stated that they enjoyed the reconnection with
their alma mater. The workload requirement was
measured on a seven point scale with one being not
very high and seven very high. The average for the
eight responses was 2.8, which means that the
mentors thought that receiving five e-mails and
responding four times was an acceptable amount of
participation for them.
Perhaps a reason that the mentors found the
workload acceptable is they thought the students
had insightful questions. The mean on a seven-point
scale with seven being very insightful and one being
not very insightful was six. This positive evaluation
was reflected in what the mentors learned about
today’s students. The respondents thought that
students were more concerned about their future
and had a greater urgency on being prepared than
when the mentors were the same age. But, the
mentors also thought that the students needed to
learn more about the day-to-day activities of specific
positions and the value of networking.
What did mentors learn about themselves from the
communication with students? The e-mail questions
prompted the mentors to reflect on their careers and
they realized how much they had learned over the
course of their careers. They also had forgotten
what it was like to be inexperienced and again this
helped them to understand how much they had
changed over the course of five to twenty years of
working.
Some mentors offered suggestions for improvement.
One mentor proposed a combination of e-mail and
telephone discussions (probably to reduce the input
time). Telephone conversations were not prohibited
in this assignment but they did not count toward the
students’ number of interactions given that a student
was less able to document the conversation and
what transpired. One alumnus suggested that the
interaction should be all about career (job) issues
and not include questions about course content.
References Available on Request.