Facebook is still testing a mentorship tool that it announced last year, as it tries to identify how to best facilitate online and offline relationships.Read More
Tag: Mentorship
How Mentorship Can Be Life-Changing for People Living With HIV
Derrick “Strawberry” Cox found out that he had HIV on March 14, 2011. He’s been managing the virus ever since, an effort that’s supported by his mentor, Tony Burns—who has been managing his own HIV for nearly three decades. Their relationship centers not just on how their antiretroviral-therapy drugs are working for them, or how […]
The Odyssey’s Millennia-Old Model of Mentorship
Homer’s The Odyssey chronicles Odysseus’s journey home in the years following the Trojan War. As he is making his way back, the goddess Athena appears to his son, Telemachus, in the form of an old family friend, Mentor, to offer him support and guidance in his father’s absence. Their interactions in The Odyssey represent one […]
How Peer Mentorship Can Change Police Departments’ Cultures
Geoffrey Alpert has, since 1975, been researching how police conduct themselves, and one finding borne out in his work is that many police officers see themselves as “warriors” against crime. He’s seen that dynamic on display as he’s studied studied racial profiling and the use of force in some of the nation’s most controversial departments, […]
Building Mentorship Out of Trauma
Robert Lang, a 68-year-old lawyer at the American Bar Association, has over the course of his career served clients facing immigration crises and domestic violence, among other issues. It’s stressful work, and in order to avoid burnout, Lang has set aside time for what he calls his “adventure” periods: He’s worked as a hospitality manager […]
What Mentorship Can Mean to Undocumented Immigrants
Well before Jose Antonio Vargas became a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and filmmaker, he was told he couldn’t get an internship at The Seattle Times because he was an undocumented immigrant. At the time he feared that his immigration status would threaten both his ability to build a career in journalism as well as his ability […]
Mentorship Without Hierarchy
In their research together, the economists Darrick Hamilton and William “Sandy” Darity Jr. have examined the racial wealth gap and policies to address it, such as a federal jobs guarantee. The pair met 20 years ago, when Darity was Hamilton’s dissertation adviser at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Since then, they’ve moved […]
Mentorship Cut Short by Suicide
Before he started working with Aaron Swartz, the Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig built his professional life around internet law and copyright policy. In the early 2000s, Lessig was at the top of his academic field, then working at Stanford. As an undergraduate student, Swartz, who had met Lessig at a computer conference when he […]
When Mentorship Goes Off Track
Mentorship is often cast as a positive experience. But for every scientist whose mentor enabled a research breakthrough and every high-school student whose mentor was key to receiving a college acceptance letter, there are people whose professional relationships were counterproductive or even damaging. And despite this reality, the potential pitfalls of mentorship are not as […]
Cars 3: A Children’s Movie, and a Fable About Mentorship
The Disney Pixar franchise Cars launched in 2006, telling the story of Lightning McQueen, a young rookie race car voiced by Owen Wilson who must learn that winning isn’t everything. Even so, the franchise itself has done just that, making over $ 8 billion in merchandise alone. While Cars has long used its platform to […]
