The Mustang Career Mentors Program offers students an exciting way to get hands-on mentorship and first-hand advice from Stevenson alumni.

Stevenson’s Career Connection Center started the Mustang Career Mentors Program in the Spring of 2020 with the goal of connecting students to alumni to provide networking opportunities and career advice.

Kelly Fewster, a career advisor at the Career Connection Center, said that the Mustang Career Mentors program is a great way to build and maintain professional connections in an online setting, especially during the pandemic when it is hard to hold in-person events.

According to Fewster, the mentors in the program can assist students with networking, personal branding skills and industry insights and career advice, to name a few. The program also has mentors from a wide variety of industries and majors, ranging from psychology to business communication.

The Mustang Career Mentor program is hosted online by PeopleGrove and acts similarly to a social media platform. Students can search for mentors based on their major and interests, view ones that match up with their specifications and connect with mentors of interest within the online platform. “Students may use the platform for either quick career-related questions or longer mentor relationships,” Fewster said. The platform also allows access to industry communities and the ability to post professional questions about a particular field or networking advice.

For mentors, both “alumni and community partners can sign up using LinkedIn or an email address and complete their profile by linking to existing social media accounts,” according to the Mustang Career Mentors Program page. Mentors can also choose the number of mentees they wish to have at any time and are notified when a student requests to connect with them.

Once a mentor and a mentee are paired up, communication is dependent upon both parties, as they will determine how often they communicate and whether that communication takes place via the platform, by phone or through email for the duration of the mentor relationship. Students can participate in the program by going to the Mustang Career Mentors Program page on Stevenson’s website and accessing the PeopleGrove platform from there. The platform uses Stevenson’s Single-Sign-On (SSO), which means students just need to use their SSO credentials to log in to the program’s website.