Library Tours

It is week two of the quarter and it is now time for the library tour. I figured that this would be pretty easy to do because I've been here for three years, but when it came down to doing it, it was harder then I thought. The first problem that I ran into was gathering my three mentees. Due the the demanding schedules that we do have as college students we weren't available to meet as one group, this lead me to giving three different tours. Though it was time consuming we got through it.

In my mind I thought that my mentees wouldn't see this tour relevant due to the fact that they are upperclassmen which was the case at first. They ask, "so why am I doing this again." This changed my the end of the tours because what they received more then they expected. They left their tours saying, "We never realized that there was these many resources in the library." Little did they know is I didn't either because the library has changed so much in the last three years, but after every tour I became a little better. This was a unique experience to me because you would think as a mentor/ tour guide you would be the leader where the mentee/ tourist sit back and learns. With our experience this wasn't the case because through the process we both lead and showed each other the way.

To me this exemplifies what a mentor-mentee relationship should be. Through the process of mentoring you have the opportunity of guiding an individual in the right direction. At the same time we must be willing to take the experience and reverse the rolls and learn from mentees.

Seeing that this is the start of our relationship I fell that we are going in the right direction and hope it continues not only through the quarter, but through our whole college experience.