For 13 years, Mary F. Fernández has advised college students studying science, technology, engineering, or mathematics. But when she hears from them, it’s usually about more than just picking classes or handling a course load.
Take the student she mentored this past academic year, a Ph.D. candidate in biological engineering from Ghana, studying at an American public university in the mid-Atlantic. Her family, whom she was hoping to support with her degree, thought she should be spending her time having children. Her husband, when he needed to take a job out of state, did not want them to live apart and asked her to go with him, a move that would have put her degree in jeopardy.
When the student (whose name and institution Ms. Fernández declined to reveal, citing privacy concerns) contacted her, she wanted to know how to work out the distance with her husband. Other times she needed some cross-cultural coaching: Her adviser at her university was sometimes late for appointments and hard to get hold of, but speaking up about it felt pushy and rude. Most of all, she wanted encouragement from Ms. Fernández, an executive at AT&T Labs Research, that her degree was worth all the struggle.
Most of those Ms. Fernández advises face more than the usual college-student quandaries. That’s because she is paired with them by MentorNet, a nonprofit organization that makes online connections between mentors at private companies, like AT&T, IBM, and 3M, and female and minority students in the STEM disciplines.
In the STEM fields, students who are not white males are usually atypical. MentorNet, for which Ms. Fernández recently became chair of the Board of Directors, tries to provide STEM students with advisers who can help them navigate a classroom or anticipate a workplace in which they may be the only female or foreign or minority employees. Ultimately, MentorNet hopes to keep them from dropping out of the field—a perennial problem for women and minorities in the STEM disciplines.
By pairing them with professionals, says David H. Porush, chief executive of MentorNet, the group gives students the opportunity to think critically about where their degrees will take them once they have left academe.
“This is about all the things you don’t see in school. It creates a bridge to the reality of the workplace,” he says.
Success and Growth
Since the beginning of MentorNet, in 1998, 95 percent of its students have remained in the STEM disciplines until graduation, and 91 percent are working in their fields three years after graduating.
Mr. Porush says both measures are above the national average for all STEM students, and adds that this is especially significant because many of MentorNet’s students are from demographic groups with persistently high attrition rates. In 2010, blacks made up 12 percent of its cohort and Hispanics 10 percent; slightly less than two-thirds of the group were female.
MentorNet now supports about 3,000 students each year at more than 100 member institutions, which range from sprawling research universities and Ivy League institutions to tiny technical colleges. This fall, however, the organization is beginning an ambitious campaign that aims to significantly increase over the next few years the number of students connected with mentors, to 30,000 a year. On September 6, MentorNet opened its services to students from any college.
The expansion will be financed with grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and the S.D. Bechtel Jr. Foundation. Students at member institutions, which each pay up to $5,000 annually to MentorNet, will still have priority matching.
As before, any students can apply, including white males, but MentorNet will continue to focus on women and minorities, working, for example, with the Hispanic College Fund and with historically black colleges and universities to spread the word about its service.
Built for Expansion
Ms. Fernández sees MentorNet’s expansion as a big opportunity for students at colleges that cannot afford to be member institutions. She is particularly eager to see the program reach community colleges, majority-Hispanic institutions, and historically black colleges and universities, which sometimes do not have the financial wherewithal to offer much guidance on their own.
MentorNet’s model will make it relatively easy for it to expand to new colleges. All of its relationships begin exclusively online, with mentors sometimes counseling students as far away as Brazil. Students create a professional profile on MentorNet’s networking site—which is similar to LinkedIn—where they can contact peers and prospective employers, browse job boards, upload résumés, and trade advice in forums. Through its algorithm, MentorNet uses their profiles to match them with a mentor. For up to eight months, MentorNet guides the online relationships between students and mentors with e-mail prompts, encouraging them to talk about job searches, personal barriers, or possible career paths that would fit well with their personal goals. (Without prompting, more than half of the students also discuss internship or job opportunities at their mentors’ companies, making the program an informal pipeline for some sponsors.)
While Ms. Fernández talks regularly on the phone with some of those she mentors, she has never met some of them in person, and there are others whom she has never called. Once, at a conference, she met by accident a former mentor 10 years after the beginning of their relationship.
But she and Mr. Porush both see the remote nature of the relationships as something that is especially positive about MentorNet’s model.
“E-mail adds power and a kind of discourse you can’t get to in a face-to-face relationship,” Mr. Porush says. “Protégés find that the fact that their mentor is dispassionate, as in not attached to their institution, and at a distance, frees them to broach issues that might be awkward if they were at the same institution or had other entanglements.”
Logistically, it also makes it easier for mentors to maintain longer relationships. More than a year after Ms. Fernández’s first contact with the Ghanaian Ph.D. candidate, for instance, they are still regularly in touch. The student has worked out the distance issue with her husband, and will finish her program within a year.
“The format allows you to exchange very personal problems, very specific problems. And that’s important because these students are dealing with more than just their education,” Ms. Fernández says.
“These are young people, they’re very vulnerable,” she says. “There can’t be barriers. And the mentor is there to help them figure out how to tear those down.”
