Today was my first phone conversation with my mentor. I dreaded the approaching schedule time for the phone call as I sat at work. Watching the minutes tick by till 12:30, the scheduled time of our phone call. Previously, I had written some questions to ask him on a small post it note. Questions like "What exactly do you do?" and "How should we approach this mentorship?". The thing is I suck at phone conversations and I really wanted to make a good impression.
Well throw all my expectations out the window. The phone call went terribly from the beginning. My questions were thrown out for being too general and not specific enough. I got no new information over what a consulting firm like his does or looks for in its employees. Instead, my mentor told me vaguely what he did in college, none of which seemed related to how he got his current job other than "I had a lot of experience with random shit not connected to my job" and a suggestion towards doing more research online and coming back with a road map of attaining my career goals.
What he does not understand, is that I want some sort of guidance in discovering what these career goals are, not some half ass comment about how he does not have enough time to start me off from square 1. To think that he has mentored before leads me to believe that all his previous mentees knew exactly what they were doing or just said fuck this and left.
As of right now, my mentor has proven himself to be completely useless, but I am willing to give this a second chance. Hopefully once I get this so called road map going, I can get something out of this relationship. I would hate to abandon him since the one job experience that he shared with me seemed pretty interesting.
-muffinman
