There we go. Hi everybody. Welcome. Thank you for joining us. I'm Claudia Taylor I'm director of events and stewardship for the Ryan College of Business at the University of North Texas. And I also serve on the cabinet for case district for, and I want to welcome you all to our latest case district for best of to gather the best of series provides an opportunity for members across our district to see our top rated sessions from the beginning of the conference in April in San Antonio. Today's session, back to basics, old school mentoring and the tick tock age is aimed at all of our district for members who want to build their leadership skills and connect across generations. Before we get started a few housekeeping items first we hope you'll ask a lot of questions, please drop them in the comments section. We'll bring that up to LV our presenter will try to get to all of your questions but of course will be mindful of time and try to end right at three o'clock. Keep an eye on the comments section to I'll be dropping links and additional information there throughout the presentation. If you experience any technical difficulty, please feel free to reach out to me directly I will try to troubleshoot, but I make no promises. I'd like to introduce our presenter today LV Aguilar LV is the executive director of alumni engagement at Texas A&M University Corpus Christi, she oversees the Islander alumni association, the island Islander mentor program, and the Islander postcard program. She has a bachelor's degree in journalism from Baylor University and a master's in public administration from 10 UCC. She is a regular presenter at our case district for conference and want a silver case award for targeted constituency engagement at the Islander mentor program and I have seen her speak at case conference before and she's fantastic. So we're very excited to welcome LV today. Thank you for being here and take it away. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. I appreciate everybody on the call I'm excited to chat with you about our mentor program. I mentioned briefly to a few folks that were here or signed on early, but I have pleasure of having my colleague Dr. Leslie on the call as well. This is a program that has a partnership with our career and development center. And luckily it also falls under our umbrella for institutional advancement and so Leslie and I are in the same division at our campus, and she handles the recruitment of the program. So if you have specific questions about that, please feel free to drop those in the chat as well. And I'm going to do my best now to share my screen and make the presentation visible to all of you. So let me see if I can get this going. So we're going to go to make this a full screen presentation. All right, do you all are you all able to see the full screen there. All right. Looks like we're in business. Okay. Um, so our university just to give you just a glimpse of who we are, is on an island like literally an island. Definitely. Good. Okay, somebody maybe Caitlin Can you. So our island university. We have about 56,000 alumni, and we come through, we've had several name changes throughout the year so we started off as the University of Corpus Christi in 1947 hurricane completely wiped out our campus, and then it became part of the state, and we were Texas for a short time, then we became a two year institution so Corpus Christi State University was a junior and senior level college for a while, but finally in like the 1994 95 timeframe the state legislature made us part of the A&M system so we have a lot of alumni that are they consider themselves tarpons from back in the, you know, 50s and 60s and then a lot of brand new alumni is all that all they know is the Islanders. We have 11,000 students, and then some unique demographics for us, 50% of our students are first generation college students, about 46% of them are Hispanic and 51% are minority and so when I talk about the mentor program, I want you all to know that you can custom whatever it needs to be for your university. Ours has evolved over time. And really, the whole purpose of it was to connect our alumni with students, but it's also it's beyond the, tell them what you do for a living. They've grown to be mentors from a. This is how we do life kind of approach and so it's been a lot of hands on and I can go into that a little bit further of our 56,000 alumni the huge portion of them 43,000 of them are in the state of Texas. And so, and you'll also see why this is important for us. Obviously a lot of you are in the alumni world you know that our main modes of what we do our communication we communicate with our alumni, we have a lot of events to provide them opportunities to show up to our games and homecoming and things like things obviously we love to have alumni donors, but the mentor program falls under a non event engagement, meaning that there's not, I mean we do have a kickoff when we start the event in the semester, but it's not something that we consider part of our everyday or, you know, monthly programming for events. How do we start the program, as they say with case we copy and steal everything. It was a program that was modeled after Marquette University, but again we changed it to kind of fit our purposes. We started off in a phased approach we only had 10 mentors, and that was essentially our board or alumni board. Well, we have a board of 30 members but 10 of them volunteer to kind of be our tape test group. Once those 10 board members agreed to do the, the program, we partnered them with students through the career and professional development center which I chatted about earlier. The recruitment from our end, we basically use social media ads to try to get alumni to participate. We also use our staff so a lot of our development officers in advancement that are maybe talking to some donor or donor potentials that are not ready to give but they want to be tied to the university or start getting involved with this this is a good entry level way of being able to get them engaged automatically, without them wanting to say oh yes I'll give you $1,000 gift or whatever the case may be. And then a lot of it has been word of mouth, we basically started the program not knowing what the reception was going to be. But now we've gotten to the point where people come to us and say, hey, I want to be a mentor, and I want to be part of this and so we try to accommodate some want to continue to do it but the goal really is every time that we have the program is to get new faces. There have been some situations where if somebody wants to be a marine biologist, we have a few alumni that maybe return each semester but the goal is to get more every semester. The program from the alumni side, they have to fill out an application, and I'm happy to share the application documents and any of the collateral for what we do via email if whoever you know wants to request that. But we essentially want to get to know a little bit about what they do for a living, what years they graduated, what majors they had, and what they feel they can contribute to the student and teach the student in the process. Through the Career Center, we also do background checks because we want to make sure that the alumni that we're pairing our students with are not dangerous individuals, and it's the general form that our HR department has here at the university that they fill out. And then my favorite part, which is step three, and this is the part where I feel is the hardest but it's also the most rewarding. The challenge here is scalability, right? So we get the applications from the students and from the mentors. Leslie and I read them both. We interview the students prior to the matching process to see if the students are kind of what we feel at a point to be ready to be mentored. And then we try to match them with the individuals. But it takes time to do this. I run, I'm the executive director of alumni. Leslie runs the Career Center. So if we were to have 200 applicants, there's no way we could do this. On average, we get about 40, 50 applicants on both sides. And so we're able to kind of scale it in that way. This is not like a software program that cranks, you know, results out or compatibility and could do it by the hundreds. So there is some scalability, but what it enables us to do is to truly connect people who are like minded or could probably make the connection work throughout the duration of the mentor program. And then finally, we have a kickoff on campus. After COVID, all of this was an in-person program. But after COVID happened, we were able to open the process up virtually. So I have alumni that are in California, Arizona, Venezuela, even, have applied virtually. And so we have a Zoom kickoff on one day, and we have an in-person kickoff one day. And they're able to match with their students on those two days. That's where they meet. And we also have them sign a few documents. And that's part of the toolkit. So the toolkit, we created some fun talking cards for the ones that are in person. Those that are virtual, we send some questions to them ahead of time, because we put them in breakout rooms after I do the introductory portion of the presentation. And you don't want them to just like sit in a Zoom room or in a classroom and not know what to say to each other. So the talking cards are kind of built in conversation starters. Then they sign a communication agreement. So that is essentially kind of a, I'm going to honor your time if you honor my time. And it's student-led. So we give the bulk of the responsibility to the student to meet with their mentor one time a month for one hour. When we first started, and I told you, the program has evolved. We used to do this every semester. So August through December, and then January through May. We have found that the mentor, because of holidays and things like that, mentors and students were saying, I didn't get enough time to like actually meet my mentor. So we've expanded that now to, we start in September and it ends in May. It also, side note, makes it a little easier from the recruiting standpoint, because I'm not having to recruit alumni mentors every semester or students every semester. We do it once a year, but it also affects the number of students and mentors that are getting picked for the program. We can handle about 40 or 50 per semester or per school year. The communication agreement just says, I will respond to my mentee in a reasonable amount of time. I'm going to respect whatever information they tell me. So if somebody works for a corporation that's about to do layoffs, you don't want the student to go on Snapchat and announce that to the world. So it's kind of a mutual understanding and they check each of the different agreement points and then sign it at the end. And then we have a goal document. We asked the two of them to come up with three goals that they would complete between when they start the program to when they end it. As simple as, I'm going to have my mentor review my resume, to more complicated, I'm going to go and visit my mentor at their place of work, if that's allowed by the mentor. Some of them have helped with grad school applications or even meeting other people in that field. So lawyers meet other lawyers, real estate agents meet other real estate agents, so forth and so on. My favorite is always when they want to learn to network or work a meeting room, because so many of our alumni mentors are like, oh yes, I'll just take you to the next alumni social. So it's always a good opportunity to get them out and connected with each other. We do periodic surveys or check ins where I just send an email because it is student driven. We want to kind of send gentle reminders of like, hey, has your student checked in with you or what have you done, but it also helps me from the recruiting side because then I have great statements or testimony from them saying, yes, I met with Sarah at Coffee Waves and I was able to do XYZ. And then they send us pictures of them like meeting and interacting with each other. So that's always important and it kind of keeps them on track that, oh, you know what, I haven't reached out to them and so they're able to connect at that point. And then we do a final check in just to kind of gauge where things went and if they have any feedback or ways that they want to communicate with us on how to improve the program. But really the bulk of the time it's like, when can I, the students are, hey, when can I sign up to be a mentor or the mentor saying, hey, can I sign up again next semester, which is usually like, not quite yet, but we'll definitely keep you on the radar. The students, we do ask, the requirements I should say for the alumni is that they've been out of school for at least three years so that they have some what we call like life and work experience and that it's not the student that just graduated last semester that hasn't even been six months in their job. So we do want people that have a little bit of life experience. We do accept master's level alumni as well. So if they have work experience, then it's important for us to continue to keep them engaged as alumni. So far we've had about 215 pairs of mentor and alumni or mentees and mentors. And as I mentioned, they're from all over the place. I had one, the Greenland and the Venezuela one were super interesting because the time differential. So they were literally signing on at like two in the morning to talk to their student and vice versa. And so I thought that that was a pretty cool way but those relationships have maintained most of the relationships from anecdotally what I've heard is that even beyond the May timeframe, they've stayed in contact with each other or, you know, check in from from time to time. Our budget for this program is $4,000 a year, $2,000 per semester. We're going to adjust this a little bit. Like I mentioned, we extended it, but it's still $4,000 a year. The bulk of it is printing for journals. We give each of them a kind of a embossed Islander mentor program journal, the printing of the talking cards. It does cost us about $20, $25, I think, to do the background checks and then catering for those kickoff meetings for the in-person folks. Lessons learned. As I mentioned briefly, we started to interview students. What happened in the first few semesters is that I would have mentors tell me that the students ghosted them, that they had no idea, you know, they couldn't get a grasp on the students' availability because they were kind of, a lot of our students have jobs on top of their schoolwork, and so they weren't prioritizing it. So we wanted to make sure that, and this is, I should have mentioned geared toward junior and senior students. We wanted to make sure that they were at a place where they could devote the time and kind of really stick with it, and you kind of are able to gauge that if you just chat with them for a few minutes, like over a Zoom interview, and you're able to get them to apply, or able to get them to be paired with somebody once you chat with them. And the check-ins are important, as I mentioned, from a recruiting standpoint, and also it keeps people on both sides. Leslie sends emails to the students, I send emails to the mentors, and we kind of get a good pulse on how things are going from both of them. And that is pretty much my presentation. I'm happy to open it up to questions, and I saw that there was a couple in the chat, so I'm going to quit sharing the screen now and take any questions that people may have. I had one question that I had someone send me. So I know you mentioned that you kind of interview the students to make sure that they're ready. What are some of the sort of guidelines there, like how do you determine whether they're ready or not? Just answering why they signed up for the program really is kind of a big one. Leslie, do you want to jump in? Any other things? Yeah, just confirming that they understand the time commitment that they are signing up for is a big piece of it, too. Just reiterating that during the interview process. And again, trying to determine why they're interested in a mentor and what they hope to gain from that relationship and that experience. And for some reason, we've had students that I don't know if they misunderstand our application process, but they think that they're gonna be the mentor to somebody instead of they're being the ones mentored. And so a lot of that is kind of clarifying that. And the communication style, I think is another big one as well, because it is a matter of wanting to be able to pair folks that will talk to each other, that there's gonna be some responsibility on the students and wanna move the mentorship forward. What kind of skills are you sort of focusing on in terms of, is it mostly like soft skills or are you getting into like, how to behave at a business dinner or those kinds of like broad things that they may not know? I mean- It's across the board, honestly, because there are very technical, the engineering student that wants to figure out how to divide and multiply whatever it is. We do tell them your mentor is not gonna do your homework for you. So that is clarified. Very good to clarify. But there is a lot, especially as I mentioned before, given the demographics of our students, I'll never, like the second semester that we did it, I had a student text me and say, oh my God, my mentor just invited me out to lunch. Like, I don't have money to pay. Like, how do I work around that? Or is there like something I can apply for so that I could offer to pay? And so we walked her through the process of like, hey, your mentor has been told that if they invite you to anything that they're responsible for paying for you. And so you don't need to worry about that. But little things like that, that most of us kind of take for granted or don't think about, it burdens them and they think about it. Leslie, I think you've had a couple of like, what do I wear to X, Y, Z kind of questions. So it runs across the gamut. And what I tell people is, especially the mentors, our students want somebody to connect with that's not their parent and that it's not their friend. And sometimes they just need somebody to listen to them. We also are fortunate that we have counseling services in our university. So if things were to be elevated to like, we don't expect our mentors to be counselors or psychologists or anything like that, but they can definitely let us know. And then we compare them with the right folks on our campus that can visit with that student. And then also from a career standpoint, Leslie has a team of career counselors that can answer questions about how much does this job pay? Or can I get an internship doing X, Y, Z? But a lot of the time, the mentors know those answers themselves. Yeah, have you, and I know some universities use programs like PeopleGrove or things like that. Have you looked into things like that at all? Or is this approach really kind of giving you what you want to get out of this program? I can speak on my end and then Leslie can come in if you want as well, but- I know it's not cheap though. Yeah, well, aside from the budget perspective, I think that we're, I feel at the cusp of truly engaging alumni and bringing in those, like I mentioned, from 1995 graduates to the ones of like last semester, that's the group that we're really working to cultivate and have what we call affinity to our university. But there's this whole other group that really hasn't heard from us or knows about us for a while. And so for me, from an alumni perspective, I want to cultivate those relationships. And so the way I do this is in this smaller scale, I'm not looking to impact 500 or 5,000 students all at once. I want to just kind of work my way through, slowly but surely engage more of our alumni. Right. Well, this is really great information. Leslie, do you have anything you want to add? Elvia does a fantastic job helping with the matchmaking. And that's one thing that's been really successful. I joke that she's our matchmaker, you know, students, sometimes there's, we have to, she goes through a process of explaining to students why maybe she made the pairing she did, but there's usually a rhyme and reason to the connection she made. And so far, I've never had a student complain and say, that was a horrible experience. They've always left getting something out of the experience, even if that person didn't have their same major or didn't have the same career field that they were looking into. Usually that person at least had a connection somehow. So it's been a really successful program and our students benefit from it every semester. One thing I also will mention is, as Elvia mentioned, we had expanded the program a little bit and we actually started inviting a few community members as well, who don't have, who aren't alumni with the university, but are community friends of the university. And so that's been another opportunity for us to engage with community members and connect them with students. Yes, and Leslie, thank you. You reminded me that depending on who applies each semester, both on the student and the mentor side, there was one semester where I swear we had, what, like 18 nursing majors. I don't know the semester, that professor must've been really hard that semester or something. But, and so in that situation, it's kind of like, okay, but I don't have 18 alumni that are nurses or nursing majors that could be paired. So what about their application? Are they also first-generation students? Are they working parents? Did they both grow up in Beeville, Texas or whatever to be able to connect them beyond that? And I would say our mentors have done a great job of being upfront saying like, hey, I don't think I can help you do organic chemistry anymore, but I do know that we can do these things and kind of help them in that regard. And then the community standpoint, that was an opportunity that actually was our college president really wanted to involve in Corpus Christi. We have a lot of refineries and Fort of Corpus Christi oil and gas. And a lot of the individuals that work there are CEOs, they're head of their departments or divisions, and they want to help us. They wanna be involved, but they're not alumni of our university. Or I should say they're not alumni yet because maybe- Who knows? Right? But maybe this is like their first opportunity. And we've gotten to a point where some of the offices in our community basically send out an email, kind of campus or not campus wide, I'm thinking university, but they send it out at their place of work and say, hey, the mentor program at the university is about to start again. Do you all want to mentor? And that helps us from the recruiting standpoint, but it also does that, hey, we have friends in the community that are watching out for our campus. And then it really feeds, there's internship programs, there's continuing education opportunities that that's how we've cultivated those relationships. And it all started because one employee decided to mentor a student that year or that semester. Right. And that's, I mean, that community engagement is really so important because you want those people to be bought in because these alumni are going to go into that community and be the employees. And you want them to be as prepared as possible when you send them out into the world, right? I did have another question that someone asked. So I know you have some mentors that are not local to the campus who are all kind of all over. Is there any difference in the materials that you get if you're doing just a virtual kind of mentoring versus in-person or is it kind of the same? No, the communication agreement and the goal agreement is the same for everybody across the board and the one hour requirement. And it's a one hour, we call it meaningful engagement. So not just a text message back and forth between them. Like they agree to meet on Zoom or Teams or whatever. I would have to say the biggest, the unfortunate thing is that they probably don't get to meet like actually in person. And so one, we don't have the photos or evidence of them like having, although we did get one where they like in the Zoom, they both posed with like an Islander Shaka, which was really cute. But there's nothing that makes their experience different. It's just a matter of, are they gonna give of that time? And then what kinds of things are they talking about? So like, it's easy to communicate back and forth with a resume, right? But some of the more hands-on, they can't take them to work a room at a social event because one lives in San Antonio and the other is here in Corpus Christi. So I feel like personally, they kind of do lose out a little bit if it's not in person, but then it's also cool because if they ever do go to San Antonio or Dallas or Austin or whatever, they at least have a connection there in that area. Yeah, that is really positive. So we use, at UNT, we use PeopleGrove and it's kind of, it's in his infancy, let's just say. I think it's only like a year or two old, but we have the capability to do groups within PeopleGrove so that people in Austin who are alums can get together and students who are there can kind of get together there. And it's something that I know there's a lot of potential there, but we just haven't really unlocked it yet. I think it's really just right now, we're using it for one-on-one mentoring in a virtual kind of capacity. So I think this is a really good program, obviously that you guys have scaled to work for you. Do you think that this program is something that you would want to fundraise for and maybe try to expand, or do you think it works better on the scale that you're at right now? I'll give you my answer and then Leslie can give you her answer. She and I really have not talked about this too much, but absolutely, I think that any opportunity to be able to expand and get our name out there more. So if Citgo or Valero or Exxon or somebody were to come and say like, we wanna sponsor your program, we would definitely, I wouldn't, cause I'm on the alumni side, Leslie wouldn't cause she's on the career side, but somebody in our advancement wheelhouse would have that conversation. But for me, I see it as another affinity group to, I wanna be able to eventually send a blast email out to everybody that's ever participated in a program and say, you wanna come to Homecoming, we'll have a reserved area for the Islander Mentor Program participants or something to that effect. I've just now, this is my fourth year at the university. So I'm just now getting to the point where my mentees are now becoming mentors because they already have that three years under their belt, right? And so I wanna see that part kind of grow. But if we were to get funding for, I mean, Marquette University, the reality is they have a person that that's all his job. His job is to recruit mentors and mentees every semester. And so I think that if we were to be able to have that capacity and grow, the need is there. Our students want this program. In recent semesters, we've had international students apply at a heavy or at a big rate because they want that connection to the community. They're here. Some of them don't have vehicles. They wanna get to know how things are done in America. And this is kind of their first opportunity to get what an office, how we operate in offices culture here in the US. And so my answer is yes. If somebody wants to fund it and it gives me and Leslie and that person to actually run it, absolutely, let's talk. I mean, you're not gonna turn down. And I think we also see a lot of requests for specialized programs. So like veteran students wanting to be mentored and connected with other veterans, international students looking at not only individuals from the United States and domestic positions, but also looking at international students who maybe were alumni who were successful in staying in the United States and obtaining sponsorship and visas and things like that. And so there's definitely some interest from these special populations to do more specialized mentoring. And so that would be a great opportunity to expand the program as well. Right. And it sounds like it's been a really positive experience for everybody involved. I feel like, Elvia, do you get a lot of really positive feedback at the end of each session? Every semester we get some like tear jerker type emails like that. And like I said, we did have the not feel good stories are just typically really revolve around the ghosting where the student is super overwhelmed and they're like, I don't wanna do this or they were wanting to land a job and maybe they like misinterpreted what the program was gonna be for. And they thought, oh, I'm automatically gonna become an engineer at such and such software company. And it's like, no, we can't promise you that. But like, I mean, it may come from it, but that's really been the bulk of the issues. Knock on wood from a like, you know, none of my mentors have gotten their students taking them out drinking or anything like that also. So the background checks have also worked as well. So it's been positive in that regard. And from the community standpoint, it has given us another opportunity to engage outside just Islanders or Islander alumni. Awesome. Well, thank you guys so much for being here and sharing this information. Everybody on the call today, we'll send out, Kase will send out an email with your slides if you're willing to share them, Elvia. Absolutely. And any other information or links that you would like to share with everybody who registered, Kase will be sending that information out after this call. I really appreciate you guys for being here and for being part of our Best of Together series. And I hope that we'll see you Elvia and Leslie at our 2024 conference in San Antonio. You can check the comments. I've got the link to registration already in there right now. I hope that you'll also mark your calendar for our next District 4 Best of Together, which is happening Thursday, January 15th at 2 p.m. Central. We will be joined by Fiona Mazarenko of the University of Texas at Austin, who will present strategies for engaging with international alumni effectively and efficiently. If you've ever been curious about how to boost your international alumni engagement, you will not wanna miss this session. I actually went to this session at the conference in San Antonio in April, and it was fantastic. Really, really good information. Fiona is absolutely the expert on engaging international alumni. She has a ton of experience. It's really, really interesting. So keep your eye on your email, and we will send out information about how to register for that. Thank you again to everybody for joining us. I hope you all have a wonderful holiday break, and we will see you on January 15th. Thanks, Elvia. Thanks, Leslie. Thanks, everybody. Francine, did you have a quick question before I sign off? Oh, you're on mute. First of all, I wanna say thank you, Elvia, because I was sick in the spring. I went out on medical leave, so I missed the conference this past spring and did not get to attend. I raised my hand, and this is great information because I want to start a mentor program here at UT Tyler and previous leadership, it was kind of something worth throwing out, just kind of what people grow, the different platforms, but budget, didn't have the funds for that. So when I saw, and I rewrote that down, I'm like, oh my God, she said 4,000. Only two, like that's doable. I know we could do that. So just trying to listen. So that's awesome with that and how that is working. So definitely excited about that. But what I raised my hand about was that when I saw the January 15th, and then I put it in the chat, the January 15th, and then I put it in the chat, the January 15th is MLK Day. So I don't, I'm like, eh, I won't be working that day, but, and others may, I don't know. I just know that, so I thought, ah, and I know it can't be changed because it's probably written in stone, but I'm like, kind of an FYI that Monday is MLK Day and some people aren't working, I don't know. So, but hopefully that doesn't impact the attendance because even if you're not and still want to jump on and if you're not at the office, it's- Yeah, it sounds like a good topic. Yeah, but yeah, so that's all I wanted. Again, just to say thank you. I certainly appreciated information. Like I said, as part of our five-year strategic plan, that's one of the things with, for me, working with the student engagement side is to, because we tried to do something like it before I was in this position, I think many moons ago, with trying to start like an alumni program, but we too are just like you guys. We've had some main changes. Was founded in 1971, started out as a junior senior university and 1998 was our first freshman class. So only 25 years with having a four-year university, that's not a long time. So just kind of dealing with those types of things. So no, this was definitely helpful. I will certainly, as we're trying to get this up and running, don't be surprised if I don't reach out via LinkedIn or email or what have you, but yeah, this was definitely glad I was able to jump on. When I immediately, my boss sent it over to me, he's like, hey, I think you need to do this. And I looked and I was like, I'm definitely gonna do that. That's LB, I'm definitely gonna do it. So for sure. So definitely was very beneficial, very helpful today for me. And I can't wait to share with my boss. So just thank you again for that. I appreciate it. Very cool. And you know how to find me if you have questions. Yeah, absolutely. All right, bye. Okay, bye-bye. Bye-bye.

mentor program

career guidance

alumni mentors

student engagement

communication agreement

kickoff event

fundraising opportunities