Mentoring Conversation

Mentoring Dialogue with Ken Rohling I worked with Kenneth Rohling on a mentoring project aim at allowing participants to practice and learn about mentoring and form networking relationships if desired. One the participant roster Ken was denoted as role reversal because he is an older student. I understood he would be playing a mentoring role. Even though I am also older, I am currently in transitional phase regarding choosing a college and my best educational route. I have been seeking advice at colleges and finding most people have no affiliation with the field they are advising for. It’s a requirement at the college I’ve been attending that the advisers have industry contact and knowledge. That seems like a very logical choice however, that requirement generally seems to be waived at the colleges. NKU left a …show more content…
We shifted to a different paradigm which was more of a mentoring partnership. We tried to get to know each other and offer each other advice where possible. We had trouble connecting due to schedules and illness, we exchanged some email but, we only had two long conversations. Our first call was little awkward and stilted but we relaxed the next time around. Email follow ups also helped to facilitate comfort levels. In both conversations we used questions with different purposes found on chart 3.2 in Mentoring and Coaching for Business. (McCarthy, pg 38, 2014) such as establishing common ground, clarify values/ priorities, seeking information, challenge assumptions, and encouraging options. Initially, we shared our hobbies, learned about each other’s families and career choices. I feel we found the most connections discussing school experiences and even more common ground discussing psychology. We discussed some of the psychology classes that we’ve taken and what we’ve enjoyed about them. We briefly touched on Myer-Briggs testing which would become