This is News?

In Wednesday’s NY Times, Tom Friedman reported on new Gallup research on what influences success and engagement at work (link here). What mattered the most? A supportive mentor and hands-on exposure to the field.

Friedman quotes Brandon Busteed, executive director of Gallup’s education division:

“Graduates who told Gallup that they had a professor or professors ‘who cared about them as a person — or had a mentor who encouraged their goals and dreams and/or had an internship where they applied what they were learning — were twice as likely to be engaged with their work and thriving in their overall well-being,’ Busteed said.

“Alas, though, only 22 percent of college grads surveyed said they had such a mentor and 29 percent had an internship where they applied what they were learning. So less than a third were exposed to the things that mattered most.”

From my perspective at Vermont Works for Women, exposure to a field and experience in using its tools is what opens the door to fields like construction, engineering, science or policing. Mentors make a particular difference in whether she is successful and stays. A 2009 report published by the National Research Council affirmed that women in science who had a mentor did better than women without one. In a survey of tenured female faculty in biology, chemistry, mathematics, civil engineering, electrical engineering, and physics, they found that assistant professors with no mentors had 68 percent probability of having grant funding versus 93 percent of women with mentors. That’s a twenty-five percent difference!

What surprises me about Friedman’s column is the way in which he appears to present these findings as new. Learning by doing has been endorsed through the ages by Da Vinci, Thoreau, Dewey, Kurt Hahn and John Holt. Bill Gates quit school to build computers; do we really need to be convinced of the value of applied learning? Mentors have had champions for centuries; one need look only to the ancient apprenticeship model, where mentors are a critical component of training.

Mentors and applied learning have proven their value, over and over again. The challenge, apparently, lies in applying what we’ve learned.

-- Tiffany Bluemle