Groups of 12- and 13-year-old students pile into the Mt. Ararat Middle School cafeteria. Seven Bowdoin students stand at the entrance waiting for their mentees. One girl spots her mentor, Jenny Lam '09, and walks quickly to meet her. The first exchange of the day between the two is shy. Quickly, though, the two begin to share stories of the past week.
After the mentee gets her lunch, the two of them sit down at a table with four of the mentee's friends. The mentee speaks intently, barely losing eye contact with Lam, laughing and smiling. Occasionally she will stop the conversation to share a fascinating fact about her mentor. For instance, she tells her friends how Lam writes seven-page papers.
Asked what she likes best about having a mentor, the mentee smiles before exclaiming, "I can talk to my mentor and she won't tell anyone." This is just one of some 160 mentor relationships that Bowdoin students have formed this semester.
Mentoring is a relatively new addition to campus life. In the late '90s, Bowdoin coordinated a program with Brunswick Junior High School. However, the staff-run program, which was open to as many as 60 mentees, did not hold the interest of enough Bowdoin students and was terminated.
Four years ago, Josh Adams, a Bowdoin senior, was an in-classroom tutor for the American Reads and Counts Program. He was approached by one of the teachers and informed of the need for mentors at the schools. This sparked the idea for Falcon Friends, which started out as an informal program but has been sustained. It was also the start of solid mentoring programs on campus. Currently there are six student-run mentoring programs available to student volunteers: Bears and Cubs, Bowdoin Central, Falcon Friends, and programs at Mt. Ararat Middle School and Mt. Ararat High School, and SmArt. In addition to the student-run programs, the Big Brother Big Sister organization also provides mentoring opportunities through its Lunch Buddies program.
Two of the more recent programs on campus are the Mt. Ararat Middle School program and SmART. Both offer a wide variety of opportunities and have notable differences; at the same time, though, both allow students to make connections with the community directly outside of Bowdoin College.
Becca Ginsberg '07, founder of the Mt. Ararat Middle School mentoring program and co-head of the umbrella program for student run mentoring programs explains, "A lot of kids don't even know that there is a college on the other side of the bridge [or] have any aspiration to go to college. [Mentors] can keep students engaged and show that learning is cool."
Two years ago, while interning for Big Brother Big Sister, Ginsberg realized that Bowdoin had yet to reach out to the Topsham school district. After contacting the assistant principal of the town's middle school, a program slowly began to take shape. Currently, the program offers 20 to 25 mentors for seventh-graders and students in the school's functional life skills program. The life skills program is designed to help underperforming students and students with learning disabilities.
At the beginning of each fall, Ginsberg and Andrew Stager '07, the other student leader, meet with the teachers of the seventh-grade classes to pair mentors and mentees up.
"What's really great is that it's not only at risk kids that get paired up with mentors.," Ginsberg says. "[Teachers] select kids with high aspirations so they can have a strong role model and continue in the right direction."
Middle school programs differ vastly from elementary school ones. The Mt. Ararat program offers mentee-mentor pairs time to hang out independently with each other. On the other hand, elementary school-based mentoring programs such as SmART allow mentor-mentee pairs to enjoy each other's company in the context of a larger group. Every Friday afternoon, SmART's 14 mentors travel to West Harpswell. SmART mentors students in kindergarten through fifth grade with art projects.
SmART was started by Tam Do '06 during the summer before his senior year. Honora Dunham '07, one of the program's current leaders, says that the goal of the program is to spend time with kids while engaging in art, ultimately building their self-esteem. Weekly art projects are decided based on what mentors remember enjoying as kids, and include pipe cleaner self-portraits, clay sculptures, and Styrofoam creatures.
Matt Nickel '07 fondly remembers when he and his mentee decided to make portraits of each other out of pipe cleaners.
"I remember my mentee gave me huge white teeth and one blue eye and another green one," he recalls. "When I asked him if that was what I really looked like, he confidently said yes."
"It's really great the improvement we see in our mentees," says Avery Forbes '08, the other leader of the SmART program. "The principal and guidance counselors of the school have even come and told us that they've seen improvement in some of the mentees class work."
Dunham adds, "We're all so exhausted when we get on the van on Fridays, but [SmART] energizes so much. It reminds me, especially, that there is a whole world living their lives outside of Bowdoin."