ESS 701: Berkeley Mentorship Cohort

Episode 701: Berkeley Mentorship Cohort

Laura Vogt:

Hello, and welcome to the seventh season of the Not So Secret Guide to being a Berkeley Engineer. I’m your host, Laura Vogt, the associate Director of marketing and communications in the College of Engineering. So a little introduction about a podcast. We started this seven years ago to give new students another resource for in-depth discussions and knowledge about campus and college resources. And we wanted you to hear from students, your peers, about their experiences and give you firsthand knowledge about class choices, registration tips, and how to build your peer group. You’ll also learn from faculty, staff, and college leadership about programs and their experiences that are hopefully help that Berkeley Engineering is where you belong. And if there’s a subject that you want to learn more about, please email me at lvogt. That’s L V OGT @berkeley.edu. And just a little bit more about me, I do a lot of the marketing for the engineering student services or ESS, as you’ll hear it referred to multiple times throughout your time here.

 

And you’ll be hearing from me each week over the summer, whether it’s with emails and podcasts or over the fall, we have the fall and spring semesters. There’s a weekly newsletter. I also designed the graphic materials for the college and ESS, and I help with the website upkeep. So you might even occasionally see me at events to take photos. But enough about me and about the podcast. Today we’re going to learn more about the Berkeley Mentorship cohort, and I’m excited to have Marcia Breslin-Cantillana and Cecilia Rosales. So thank you both for being here today.

Marcia Breslin-Cantillana:

Hi. Hello. Happy to be here. Thank you, Laura.

Laura Vogt:

So Marcia, let’s start with you and you can tell us about yourself and your role for Berkeley Engineering.

Marcia Breslin-Cantillana:

Yeah, my name is Marcia Breslin-Cantillana and I am the Student Engagement Manager at the Engineering Student Services. And my role in our team in general, we are just aiming to serve students and give them the best possible experience here at Berkeley. And the mentorship cohort plays a huge role in that because we want to make sure that you engage not just with us, but also with other students, that you form community, that you have fun here at Berkeley, and that you get all kinds of different tips that might improve your experience.

A little bit more about me. I’m originally from Chile and I had a completely different career in the past. And when I was retiring from that career, I was a professional dancer, so I had to retire young. I decided to go back to school and I went to community college and then I transferred to UC Berkeley. I worked at the transfer center for a little bit. Then I worked for several years at the admissions office, and I recently moved to the College of Engineering almost a year ago, and it’s been an amazing time here. I’m very excited to be part of this great team. So thank you. Thank you for having us today, Laura.

Laura Vogt:

Thank you so much for being here. I’m excited to hear that you’re a dancer in a past life. I did theater in my past life. And Cecilia, I know you’re a student in Berkeley engineering. So can you introduce yourself and tell us what you’re studying?

Cecilia Rosales:

Yeah, of course. So my name’s Cecilia. I’m studying electrical engineering and computer science. I’m a rising junior. I work with Marcia at the cohort, but I was a mentee before working at the cohort, so I know a little bit more about what it’s like to be both a mentee and a mentor. So yeah, that’s me.

Laura Vogt:

And are there any activities or anything that outside of the mentorship cohort that you’re involved in?

Cecilia Rosales:

There’s a few activities actually. I’m part of a bunch of women engineering societies, Hispanic engineers and scientists and the prep family and prep on campus with the ESS.

Laura Vogt:

Oh, that’s awesome. I’m so glad you’re so involved in that. You get to be part of all these different groups. And again, thank you for being here today. So let’s start off with what is the Berkeley mentorship cohort?

Marcia Breslin-Cantillana:

The Berkeley mentorship cohort, BMC for short is a year long program. We start in the fall and it continues until the end of the first academic year. So the idea is that we create multiple student cohorts that we call families and we ask the students, so when they apply to select one of the families that they’re interested in participating. That said, even if they select a family, that does not mean that they are limited to participating with that family only. The idea of the cohort is that it’s a huge umbrella that has this multiple families, but we all come together, we create community, we meet each other, we learn how to coexist and to find different resources together.

I am, obviously, I’m running the program, so I’m the person who will connect them with different resources and who will provide different opportunities for them to participate in workshops and different activities throughout the year. I’m also the person who will be helping with the matching because each one of these students will be paired with a student mentor who has been already in Berkeley for more than a year. And so I’m in charge of that, but I have an amazing team of students working with me. And why so many students? Because this is a student-centric program. This is to serve students to improve their experience and is led by students. So the student mentors are the ones doing the actual work, the ones connecting with them and making sure that the students are creating this sense of community and sense of belonging here at Berkeley.

And honestly, I mean I’ve seen, for example, Cecilia, I’ve seen her in action talking to students and the amount of information that these students have is really amazing and I could never compete with that. So my role really is to manage the program and make sure that the BMC lead mentor team, which is my team, come together and we create different resources, opportunities, workshops, events, parties, all kinds of different things, field trips, everything that we can to provide a sense of community to our incoming students.

Laura Vogt:

Thank you for that. So Cecilia, you had said you had been a mentee. Why do you think students should apply?

Cecilia Rosales:

So I think being a mentee is a really valuable experience, especially coming in as a freshman because you’re coming in, you don’t really know the campus, the environment, the resources and being a mentee allows you to connect with someone who’s an upperclassman and they can direct you on the right path and help you find resources, build a community, look for internships, build networking opportunities, and all of the above. So being a mentee is just a really valuable experience because I know, personally, when I came in as a freshman, I was really lost and confused and I didn’t know where to exactly start with my college career.

So I applied as a mentee to the cohort and my mentor helped me a lot. They helped me with my resume, they helped me with networking, a bunch of different opportunities. So being a mentee is like, it’s just applying for a bunch of different opportunities and getting someone to lead you on the right path and someone who is the same major as you. And someone who can tell you like, “Oh, I did this and I did this, I didn’t do this the right way. So this is how you do it.” It’s just sort of leading you on the right path, if that makes complete sense.

Laura Vogt:

No, that totally makes sense. Did you find that the person who was your mentor that first year is somebody that you’ve gone back to later on to ask more questions or to see if they have any help or support later on?

Cecilia Rosales:

Yeah, so when you become a mentee, your mentor isn’t just that person in your life for that first year, they’re in your life for your whole college career. So I constantly find myself going back to my mentor, asking them questions, catching up with them, little things like friendly talks, so how’s life going? How’s internships, how’s the summer? But also important things. So how can I get an internship? Do you have any advice? Do you mind looking over my resume? Little things like that. So it’s not necessarily just a professional relationship with your mentor, it’s also a personal bond and that bond is

yours for as long as you can keep it.

Laura Vogt:

That’s awesome. I’m so glad that you’re able to create that connection to build on your experiences as a mentee. How much time did you think was involved being part of the program?

Cecilia Rosales:

So the time, it kind of varies by mentee and mentor. So it’s just a matter of comparing your schedule with your mentor and seeing how many times you can actually meet throughout the week and how many times both of you want to meet throughout the week. So personally with my mentor, I think we only met two times a week, maybe three if we had corresponding and correlating timeframes that were free. But it depends on the mentor and the mentee. I want to say maybe like four to five hours a week would be a good rough estimate. But again, these hours and this timeframe is bound to change based on the availability of both you and your mentor.

Marcia Breslin-Cantillana:

And I would like to add there that the mentors are required to comply with certain things because of the way they’re participating in the program. But for mentees it’s very flexible. We only ask that they actually participate, whatever that means to them. And for some students to get together with their mentor four or five times a week might be a lot and for others might be necessary. And so we have mentees who meet with their mentor once a month because they feel like they have a lot going on and that one time is more productive and meaningful to them than meeting more often.

But we have other mentees who create study groups with their mentors and they get together constantly. We also try to pair them based on their major. So like Cecilia mentioned, sometimes they will see each other taking classes together and they’ll take advantage of that opportunity to also study together or be in a group project together or something like that. So it really depends. It’s flexible and it’s just a matter of communicating with their mentor to make sure that, and they are both in a good place to be meeting and they’re not stressing about it because that’s not the idea. It’s the opposite of that.

Laura Vogt:

I really like that it’s flexible, that you could really build it into your schedule. And so who are these applications open for?

Marcia Breslin-Cantillana:

These applications are open to all students who are newly admitted to Berkeley and are coming to Berkeley as a first year. It could be a transfer student coming as a junior, but their first year in Berkeley or a frosh coming fresh out of high school or even a student who had maybe a gap year in between and decided to come back or come to school a little later, no problem. But if it’s their first year at Cal, those are the students who will benefit the most with this program.

Laura Vogt:

I’m glad that it’s open for transfers and for first year or frosh students. For either one of you, do you think that there’s anything special that students should be paying attention to when they apply?

Marcia Breslin-Cantillana:

One thing that I saw last year is that not many students talked in their application about where they’re coming from, where they grew up or where their community college or high school was located. And that information is very helpful because the matching process is very intentional. I read through all the application and I read their responses carefully to make sure that we have a good match. And so we ask several different questions about, for example, why they want to be MET and there are any activities, hobbies, or anything they participate in or any organizations that they would become that they would like to be become a part of.

So we have several different questions that will help them talk about the things that they want to get out of this program and also talk about, so where they come from and the things that they’ve been doing. And that way I can, but again, my first, maybe one of the most important factors of the matching will be the major. And this comes from the mentors, actually they have told me that this is by far the most important thing because it’s better for them to provide tips and resources. All the different majors have different ways and different classes, different professors, et cetera. And so they think that the major is really, really important when pairing them with students and that the mentees will get much more out of the program if they start understanding their major and what classes to take and when and where and how to postpone some classes, how to take some right away, et cetera.

So based on that feedback from the mentors, that’s one of the main things that I do. I classify the students per major right away, but then after that I read where they grew up and what interests they have and what kinds of things they want to explore here at Berkeley. So I think just providing as many details as possible in each one of the sections will be very, very helpful. Cecilia, anything that you would like to add?

Cecilia Rosales:

No, I think you covered it all. I think it’s just a matter of not being afraid to mention the little things. Don’t feel like you’re oversharing because most of the time that information is just really helpful to us in helping find perfect mentor for you. So don’t feel like you’re oversharing, don’t refrain from talking about yourself. Just talk about yourself and keep going essentially is what I’m trying to say.

Marcia Breslin-Cantillana:

And everything of course is confidential so that we use this for pairing, but we won’t share this with anyone else so they can share as much as they want to.

Laura Vogt:

And we haven’t really talked about the timeline of the application process. So the deadline to apply is June 1st?

Marcia Breslin-Cantillana:

I’ll open it on June 2nd just to give them the full day to commit to Berkeley if they haven’t done so. But after that is closed, the application will open the following day, June 2nd. It’s not first come, first served. We are trying to be as inclusive as possible. We’ll be trying, we’ll do our best to accommodate everyone. So we will keep the application open until August 29th. That’s a Tuesday. So August 29th, 2023, that’s when we’ll close the application. We have many, many participants in the program. We have a few, last year we had about 130 mentees frosh and another hundred transfer. So we expect the numbers to be similar. So we are trying to do our best to recruit as many mentors as possible to be able to accommodate everyone. But the students have after June 2nd and until August 29th.

Laura Vogt:

Okay. And do you have a kickoff event for them to meet the mentors? At the beginning of the year or?

Marcia Breslin-Cantillana:

In September, we will have a welcoming event and that’s when the students meet their mentors for the first time. And it’s just a very casual lunchtime gathering. We have some games, some food, some drinks. We kind of just mingle and I help with, I have a mic and I call names if they’re not finding their mentors, if they didn’t make a plan beforehand, I call the name and say, “Hey, this person is looking for this other person.” And then we see them meet and it’s a beautiful thing. We’ll take some pictures and very casual, but then me of course, and Cecilia and the whole team will be available to support. So if a connection is not happening or if there are any comments or anything that we should take care of, we’ll be there to help with that.

Laura Vogt:

And is there anything else that either of you would like to add?

Cecilia Rosales:

I just want to mention the cohort is an amazing experience. You’re not only building a bond with your mentor, but you’re also building community with the whole cohort itself. And a lot of people feel the experience with the cohort is so valuable that they come back and apply as mentors in the following year. So most of the mentors are previous mentees from the cohort. So I feel that, I guess obviously the first thing I want to say is don’t feel discouraged to apply because I know there’s an application process, but it’s an easy application process. It’s just talking about yourself and no one is going to look at that information but us. So like me, Marcia and some of my other coworkers.

And second thing I want to say is if you feel lost in as a Berkeley engineer, the cohort is for you, especially for you because it’s meant to help lead you on the right path from the start so that you don’t feel afraid or discouraged to reach out to people, to find resources and to build community. All of the above. So don’t be discouraged and yeah, apply. It’s a fun resource. It’s a fun activity. We have networking opportunities, Google panels. Yeah, so don’t be afraid to apply.

Laura Vogt:

Do you have one particular experience so far working with the mentorship program, Cecilia, that stands out to you more than any of the others?

Cecilia Rosales:

I think to me the, it’s not necessarily one, it’s multiple. And I think what I find the most valuable is the networking opportunities. So when I did the cohort there wasn’t really any networking opportunities, but Marcia introduced these networking opportunities. So you could talk with people from Apple, from Google, from a bunch of different companies and they’re intimate meetings with the people who come to represent the companies. So it’s usually one or two, maybe. Well, it ranges from a group of one to, I want to say maybe six, seven people from the company and we meet in Sibley Auditorium and after their meeting, after their presentation, you have the opportunity to actually go up to these individuals and network with them and it’s a lot smaller and intimate than it is if this was offered to the whole campus.

So it gives you a better chance to actually network with them and say, hi, my name is so-and-so. My email is so-and-so, do you have any opportunities that are open? Yeah, so I think the networking opportunities are definitely the ones that stand out to me, especially as an E’s major because internships are really competitive within the field. So it just gives me that opportunity to network as well within the meetings and the presentations.

Laura Vogt:

That’s awesome. Thank you. And Marcia, is there anything you wanted to add?

Marcia Breslin-Cantillana:

Yeah, a couple of things. I would like to first say that we will be making some changes to our website in the summer. And so to stay tuned because we are updating, we are adding families and we are going to add some descriptions and pictures and fun stories. Also, success stories like Cecilia mentioned before, mentors and mentees becoming best friends and even doing some study abroad together or something like that. So some kind of nice stories.

And also I wanted to really quickly tell you about the different families that we have right now. This is just to put it in the student’s radar, they can start thinking about it and considering if this is something that they would like to participate in. But we currently have seven different families. One family is the culture family and this family is open to anyone who might be coming, for example, from out of state or an international student or anyone who might not say like, oh, I’m from California and I self-identify as this or that is an open family that celebrates all cultures and all students coming to Berkeley.

We have the queer family that welcomes queer students and helps them create a sense of belonging in the college of engineering and in the field of engineering at large. Like Cecilia mentioned, we have some professionals who come mentor our students. So they’re alumni, they are Cal alumni and they are now involved with Apple or Google or different companies and they come talk about their experience and like Cecilia said, they offer the opportunity to network. Same with the women in engineering. We want to highlight their experience as a female self-identifying engineer. And we also have the prep family that is a student that creates community for students who are low income, first generation and underrepresented student minorities. We have the transfer student as I mentioned before, and of course it welcomes and supports all transfer students.

We have the resilience family that highlights experiences to support students who are at academic risk. So that that’s the one family that requires mentees to also enroll in a seminar during their time because we want to support with academic resources and some other structure in addition to the mentoring. And then our newest family and we’re very excited to be collaborating with the EOP’s undocumented student program is the EBB family, which stands for Engineers beyond Berkeley. And that’s for any student who has been affected by immigration constraints, whether they are undocumented themselves or if they have maybe a family or close friend who has been affected by this, they can choose to participate in this family.

And our purpose with this new family is to create a lot of resources and find a lot of information for students so they can get the best out of Berkeley and beyond. That’s why we included the word beyond there because we want to make sure that they find the tools and their resources to access internships and job positions in the future as well.

Laura Vogt:

That’s awesome. I’m so excited to see the developments and the things that you’ve done to grow the program since you first started. That sounds really cool.

Marcia Breslin-Cantillana:

Thank you.

Laura Vogt:

Well, thank you both so much for being here today and talking about the mentorship program and the benefits of being involved. So again, the applications are going to open June 2nd through August 29th, and the website you’re going to want to check out is coesandbox.berkeley.edu/Berkeley-mentorship-cohort. Thank you everyone for coming today, for being here and for kicking off my seventh season of the podcast. And thank you everyone for tuning in and we’ll see you again next week. Thank you.

Marcia Breslin-Cantillana:

Thank you.