Blog 23 | Exit Interview Prep

What is your essential question, and what are your answers?  What is your best answer and why?

• How can youth mentor ship programs level the playing field for under represented students?
• Accessible
• Mentor ship programs, are either distant, unavailable to students who struggle financially or they do not exist to students in poor communities. Solving this issue helps mentoring programs level the playing field for the under represented.
• Mentoring
• Mentor ship programs provide mentors, these are important for the students, exposing them to college. This answer is to be worded differently,  this focuses on how mentoring relationships are beneficial to students socially and academically. A mentoring focused program is able to provide students with experience.
• Activities
• Many students, do not get mentors and do not get the opportunity for a head start in life, or college. Being able to have a mentor should be key. Mentor ship programs should provide other sets of "activities" that strengthen the students social and academic capabilities, like group based mentoring like the Hubs of I-Poly, or providing workshops, proving to be useful such as scholarship and college application workshops.
• Best Answer: Youth mentor ship programs can level the playing field for the under represented by being more accessible to students.

What process did you take to arrive at this answer?

• Having volunteered at Uncommon Good, I was able to see how accessible this place is. It is located in a safer non "ghetto" area, Claremont. This program is also a Non-Profit, meaning students aren't meant to pay a single penny for their mentoring/tutor sources.

What problems did you face?  How did you resolve them?

• Finding the essential question was one of my main problems, but once I was able to get a hold of this question I was able to find the key issues that my topic faces and how it can resolve them. Many of the issues that I found was that there aren't a lot of mentoring programs that can help every single student, another issue is that many under represented students don't have the motivation to get into a college finding a successful role model.

What are the two most significant sources you used to answer your essential question and why?

• The most significant source for me was my 3rd interview and a journal/literature review called "Effectiveness of programs to improve post secondary education enrollment and success of underrepresented youth"