With a couple of my classmates, I decided to read “Youth Initiated Mentoring: Investigating a New Approach to Working with Vulnerable Adolescents”. The first correlation that we recognized between the reading and our work was that the study also allowed their students to choose their mentors and demonstrated better results for the mentees when they got a choice of their mentors. This is demonstrated in the article when it states, “Results also revealed that relationships were more likely to endure when youth chose their mentors on their own (rather than receiving help from parents or program staff) and when mentors were of the same race as youth” (Schwartz, Rhodes, Spencer, Glossman).
Personally, I don’t think we learned anything too different from our work with the students than the writers of the study did; but it did help us confirm that our assumptions of how to go about this mentoring experiment were valid. Granted, we are all students and the researchers that wrote the study are full-fledged adults with full-time jobs dedicated to their research; however, there are still some strong parallels that can be drawn. I wouldn’t exactly change much from their procedure if we were to conduct this experiment again, because they demonstrated a successful experiment with the way they went about things. Nevertheless, there is always going to be stuff that we can learn from other mentorship programs (successful or not) and implement into our mentorship program should we continue it.