✏️ How to be a Good Mentee
02-15-2025
The Tri-Mentorship program is UBC BizTech's annual premier mentorship program and one of the core experiences that undergraduates interested in a career in business and technology.
Last year, I was one of the junior mentees in the program and was also awarded Junior Mentee of the Year. This year, I led a workshop to this year's new intake on what I believed it meant to be a good mentee.
You can see my slides here or feel free to scroll below to see the overview.
Now before I go into any of the content, I want to say that I myself am still on the process on learning. Leading this workshop was an initiative to share what I've learned with other individuals who might have been in a similar spot to before. Hopefully you'll find this helpful too :)
1. Mentimeter
I wanted to kick off my workshop with a Mentimeter (haha "mentee-meter" ... get it?) getting students thinking about what their why is. What do you want to get out of Tri-Mentorship? Why are they here?
One of the speakers that I always take inspiration from is Simon Sinek, and in his book, "Start With Why," he dives into the details of the Golden Circle and how everyone knows what they do, some know how they do it, but very few people actually know why they do it. He believes that too often, we orchestrate our lives on the outside of the Golden Circle around what we do instead of starting from the inside, why we do things. Similarly, in all mentorship programs, I always start by asking myself why I'm here and what my goals are.
2. Introduction
What do I know about being a good mentee?
Last year, I was apart of UBC BizTech's 2023/2024 Tri-Mentorship program. As a first year, I was confused on my future career path and didn't know what to do. There were all sorts of careers that I wanted explore and look into including entrepreneurship, consulting, product management and software development. Commiting to one career felt like giving up on everything else.
Choosing a career quickly was crucial, but at the same time I didn’t know what it would be. That was my why for joining Tri-Mentorship.
Meeting my mentor at Tri-Mentorship was one of the main reasons I’m pursuing software development now and I'm continually motivated even to this day to learn and grow.
My own experiences in Tri-Mentorship left a profound impact on my career trajectory and led me to lead this workshop and help other mentees in Tri-Mentorship to have the best experience and get what they want.
3. Before mentorship - Be prepared.
3.1 Reach out.
Don’t be scared of reaching out, and I'm saying this as someone who for the longest time –and still quite often now– have anxiety talking to people "above me." It would always feel as if I'm asking them for something without anything to give. However, people genuinely want to help.
Now, you might be might be thinking; but John,
- "I’m scared of rejection."
- "What if they don’t care?"
- "Why would they want to help? It feels like i’m taking up their time."
And my answer to the first two questions is; they do care and they do want to help. On BizTech, I'm apart of the Partnerships and Outreach team, which consists of a lot of rejection, but it’s important to keep in the back of your head that you first need to shoot your shot, to make it. Here's an analogy that I came up with:
Imagine if you have to make a baskebtall shot for a million dollars and you could try an infinite number of times. The catch is that you have to be blindfolded and standing half a court away. Even with these limitations, you’d try all day everyday, because the reward of making that shot is just too large to ignore.
The same thing goes with mentorship. You don’t know how many tries it takes, but you know that you'll learn and grow so much when that one person responds. And spoiler alert, your chances of getting a reply from reaching out is much higher than making a basketball shot, blindfolded and standing a half court away.
Now to answer the last question; why would they help me? Here's another analogy:
Imagine some high school student was reaching out to you, asking for tips to get into UBC. Would you help them or reject and ignore them? Of course, you’d try your very best to help them. Why? Because you have been there yourself.
The mentors that you are reaching out to, have tread the path you're walking right now, and are more than inclined to help you.
3.2 Do your research.
Do your research means knowing what you want. What is it that you want a mentor's help for? Is it improving your resume? Helping with mock interviews? Or learning more about the career/industry? Knowing exactly what you need help with, helps your mentors with providing you the exact help you need.
Remember your "why's," that you all put into the Mentimeter? Well, my why was figuring out if that’s the career I wanted, and once that was settled, I moved on to improving my resume and interviewing skills.
The question to ask is: What do you want?
4. During mentorship - Take initiative.
4.1 Ask questions.
How can you expect mentors to help you if you don’t have any questions to ask? And don’t just ask any questions, ask good questions.
Make sure they are thoroughly researched. Ask stuff you are genuinely curious and interested about. Is it what they do? Is it their journey to their current role? What decisions did they make to get them where they are?
Personally, I’m more interested in the person’s journey and so a lot of my questions revolve around why they decided to go into 'xyz' career. What are they planning to do next? Why are they planning to do that?
One question that I’ve gotten is: How do I get along with my mentor and not make it awkward? How do I become comfortable with my mentor?
Prepare a lot of questions but don’t follow it like a script. It’s one mistake I made when I was reaching out. At the end of the day, your mentors are humans and humans crave genuine and meaningful conversations. If you have a bunch of questions and you want to get through them like a check-list, that's no different than just asking ChatGPT to help you.
The takeaway for this is to be curious, ask questions but more importantly be human.
4.2 Do your homework.
One of the most common pitfalls –that even I myself have done– is to not take action on the advice they are given. What happens when you reach out again asking your mentor what you need to do to land “xyz” job. Well chances are they’ll probably tell you the same thing.
If my mentor tells me to LeetCode to prepare to pass my interview and I don’t do anything. I wait until I get an interview then ask them, you can’t expect them to tell you anything other than what they’ve already told you since they can’t actually do it for you.
Maybe they can give you some general interview tips but a lot of the preparation comes before the interview. Knowing what you need to do, is half the battle, the other half is doing it.
A key mistake that people also make is to just blindly follow the mentor’s advice (e.g. if they tell you to go to networking events, don’t just do it with no thought).
Being humble doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t challenge your mentors if you have a differing opinion, it means that you ask them about it, and why it should help. You should know why you’re actually doing something.
Do your homework to help them help you.
5. After mentorship - Follow up.
5.1 The relationship.
Mentorship doesn’t end here, it starts here.
I still talk to mentors everyday, even if it isn’t about mentorship stuff/career stuff. The mentors you make are your lifelong teachers and friends.
Mentors are super important in helping you grow, and you never stop growing. In fact they’re also growing, learning to be good teachers, mentors and leaders. Help them grow as well.
5.2 Give back.
Be respectful and help other people out. I think this is self-explanatory. Even if your mentors want to be here to help, they still volunteered their time out of their own personal lives to help us.
Be respectful of their schedules. Be on time, don’t flake on them or be late.
Beyond that, you should update them on your progress. They do care about it!
Last but not least, please don’t gate keep. Gatekeeping is the enemy of mentorship.
Just like how your mentors are not gatekeeping their path to success to you, you shouldn’t gate keep that information to other people. Help those around you and be willing to just as your mentors were willing to help us.
6. Hear it from your mentors!
As good as it was to share my wisdom with my own newfound mentees, at the end of the day, hearing what it means to be a good mentee from the mentors will help just as much.
Shoutout to Lucas Gingera for filming and editing the video below.
Two questions were asked:
- What do you look for in a good mentee?
- If you had one piece of advice to give to all the mentees here today, what would it be?