Can College Students Mentor Younger Students?

Although college students can mentor younger students, they still need the proper training to be able to successfully mentor younger students.

Being a mentor requires maturity, responsibility and tack to be successful in the job. A mentor is someone who helps someone and therefore should be more mature and knowledgeable than his ward. It is not just a teaching process wherein the mentor teaches what he is suppose to teach to the ward and leave after finishing his task but it is a process that needs more than teaching. A mentor is more than just a teacher; instead a mentor has a mundane of responsibilities rested on his shoulders. A mentor is a teacher who doesn't only teach but guides, leads, counsels and nurtures a person to become knowledgeable and worthwhile.

College students are still in their process of learning and honing their ability to guide and teach others.  College students are not qualified to become mentors because they are still young people who also need mentoring themselves. College students must be given more time and maturity before they could mentor other children. It is not right to give college students responsibilities that would distract their studies. While it is true that some students could become mentors for some reasons, they still need training and adjustments to be able to mentor.

There are lots of things to take into consideration before one could become a good mentor. One is intelligence. One could not teach a child without this asset. Knowledge is always inculcated in mentoring and to be able to mentor means having knowhow in what you need to teach a child. Maturity is also considered. When one is immature he cannot expect to become a successful mentor. There are many things that a mentor will encounter as he mentors a child and maturity must be met in order to tackle obstacles that come while mentoring. Patience should also be met when someone wants to become a mentor. Young men and women are sometimes very impatient and cannot handle mentors who are very aggressive. They might end up hurting their students in this case.

Mentoring is a job done by people who are already professionals and have the right training and knowhow of becoming a mentor. Children are very hard to handle at times and it takes one to have the utmost patience and the tack to make the child behave. Since college students are still on their learning process, it is not right to give them a responsibility which will make them encounter problems that they cannot handle. It is better for them to finish college first before they could go into mentoring children.

There are many situations wherein mentoring is difficult to tackle. One is when a child refuses to listen or really wants his teacher to get annoyed. Some children could be really nasty and younger men and women could hardly cope with these children. Another thing is that there are children who make fun of their mentors especially when they know that their mentor is very young. There are times when a mentor needs to be strict so that the child would learn to put himself in the right place. In such situations, college students could be left to suffer situations that they cannot handle.

While mentoring is a tough process, college students could mentor if they qualify for the job.  There are college students who can handle students pretty well.  There are those who could beat some professional mentors too.   If a college student is good then he or she could mentor younger students but they need the proper training because they still lack the maturity .