On a bitterly cold January day, close to 20 junior-year students perform a monthly ritual, filing into a third-floor conference room at Boston’s Madison Park Technical Vocational High School on Malcolm X Boulevard in the city’s Roxbury neighborhood. Meeting them here are young professionals from Ernst & Young (EY) who’ve abandoned their cubicles for a few hours to lead a team mentoring session with low-income, first-generation students who aspire to go to college.
Mentors and mentees are young and ethnically diverse, but it’s easy to sort them out. The group is cleanly divided along a distinct “suits or T-shirts” fashion fault line. Today, though, the students are the suits, encouraged by their mentors to try business attire on for size.
Brendan Sweet, only two years removed from college himself, leads a discussion about college academics. “First question: What is a major?” asks Sweet, a gray “Ernst & Young” crewneck tee pulled over his Oxford dress shirt. No answer issues from mentees scattered around the perimeter of the fluorescent-lit, cinderblock room. A kid stares at the pink tile floor. Sweet tries again: “Does anyone know what a minor is?”
To keep things moving, mentors talk about their own majors and minors. Galina McDonnell quizzes the kids on how much education is required to enter various career fields. Yomarie Habenicht asks students to turn in motivational letters they should have written to their senior-year selves. Mentees who finished the assignment get a movie pass. “We want to make sure you guys did your homework,” Habenicht says. McDonnell reminds them of an upcoming SAT prep course offered by Let’s Get Ready, which will refund the $25 course fee to students who attend 75 percent of the study classes. Today’s session concludes with students surfing the College Board website for more information about academic disciplines.
The employees who volunteer their time are at the center of Ernst & Young’s College MAP (Mentoring for Access and Persistence) program, an in-house, team-based college mentoring initiative that helps underserved kids in Boston, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York and 19 other cities. EY created the program five years ago to encourage “skills-based” volunteerism. “We know from research that when people use their skills, they deliver 10 times the value than when they are doing good in a non-skilled way,” says Deborah K. Holmes, director of corporate responsibility for EY in the Americas.
Learning by mentoring
EY fashioned College MAP to align with its corporate culture by encouraging employees to deploy their skills in the areas of education, entrepreneurship and environmental sustainability. The program’s benefits flow in more than one direction. By assisting students, volunteers gain skills that help them with colleagues and clients: leadership, public speaking, collaboration, inclusivity and, yes, mentoring, a professional skill that EY’s leaders value.
“Mentoring happens every day on the job,” says Holmes, referring to the way EY acculturates and advances employees. “Our learning model is a mentoring model. Knowing how to be an effective mentor is mission-critical for our workforce.” College MAP’s team-based model also aligns with expectations that employees will learn to work collaboratively with people from diverse backgrounds. “Everything that happens at EY happens in teams,” Holmes says.
College MAP is a classic win-win, EY’s leaders say. Mentors fit in better and enjoy their work more than peers who don’t volunteer. “We have quantitative evidence that employees who are involved in College MAP score significantly higher on all of our measures of employee engagement,” Holmes says. “We want them to be proud of working at EY. We want them to recommend EY to their friends. We want them to stay with us if they get an offer elsewhere. Our people who are involved with College MAP are statistically more likely to answer those questions in the affirmative than a matched sample of their peers.”
Among corporate mentoring programs that strive to promote college success among low-income, first-generation, at-risk youth, College MAP is emerging as a model. “This is unique in terms of one corporation producing this many mentors across the country,” says Leroy Nesbitt, program director at College for Every Student, a nonprofit organization that has helped EY develop and manage the company’s signature corporate responsibility program focused on education.
Back on the third floor of Madison Park High School, mentor Alexandra “Allie” LeBlanc and student Cesarina Ruiz-Lara huddle around a computer monitor. LeBlanc, 26, is from a white, middle-class neighborhood in Concord, N.H. She graduated from high school in a class of 78 people and earned a degree from Fordham University. She has been at EY for a year. She found out about College MAP from a colleague “who lit up talking about it,” says LeBlanc. She jumped at the chance to help at-risk kids. “My college experience was tough enough (even) having all the support in the world.”
Cesarina lives with her father, who brought her here from the Dominican Republic. Cesarina’s mother is still there. The daughter ended up at Madison Park because that’s where the Boston Public Schools sent her. The school’s 1,120 students arrive here from across the city, often without a friend.
Many of them bring baggage. Forty percent of Madison Park’s students have special needs, twice the average of other schools. English is a second language for 30 percent of students here, and most of the kids don’t have a parent who went to college. With more than 1,100 students on site, the school’s five guidance counselors have their hands full. “We’re a high-needs school,” says Mary Gail Bryan, Madison Park’s director of student support services.
Indeed. Gang activity is common, metal detectors a daily reality. On consecutive days in January, a student and the parent of another child were killed, the latter while closing up a barbershop for the evening. “Our kids have witnessed and been victims of a great deal of violence,” Bryan says.
LeBlanc and other mentors can’t change everything, but they are helping kids clear at least a few hurdles that trip them up. Mentors help with FAFSA forms and college applications; they offer encouragement and promote resilience; they do what they can to keep kids on the college track. The week before Christmas, Madison Park’s College MAP cohort visited Boston College, met with the director of admissions, and received an etiquette lesson from an international chief of protocol. It was an epiphany for Cesarina, who returned home and set a proper table for her family’s next dinner. “It’s not just helping them with college; it’s helping them with their life skills,” Bryan says.
Cesarina credits College MAP mentors with helping her to order priorities and set a direction for herself. “They help me to take the school more seriously,” says Cesarina, who continues to develop fluency in English. “If you don’t study to get more preparation for your future, you don’t get an opportunity. … I was pretty lost. They helped me a lot.”
When College MAP started at Madison Park, only students with high grade-point averages were invited to participate. Now it’s open to everyone. Demand is increasing, and students are being turned away. “Hopefully next year they can take more kids,” says Belle Moreau, one of the guidance counselors.
LeBlanc, a corporate recruiter at Ernst & Young, expected the College MAP experience to be rewarding. What she didn’t foresee was that being a mentor would change the way she thinks about her job. But now, after seeing firsthand the talented, at-risk kids at a school like Madison Park, LeBlanc’s perspective has shifted. She now makes a conscious effort to seek “alternative sources for talent so we don’t go straight to Harvard Business School. … It has forced me to look outside the typical profile.”
“Sometimes I feel that (being a mentor) benefits me more than it does them,” LeBlanc says. “It really makes me feel good at the end of the day.”
Many points of contact
In addition to the group dynamic of College MAP’s team model, each mentee also has a buddy mentor. Between monthly group meetings, mentor-mentee pairs talk on the telephone, exchange texts and e-mails, and meet in person. Also this year, for the first time, the program gives mentors the option of continuing to work with mentees who are making the transition to college.
Walter Maya is one of College MAP’s first transition mentors. A native of Colombia and the youngest of four children, he was brought here by his single mother. Like one-third of EY’s employees, he is a first-generation college student for whom the “college track was bumpy.” When Maya arrived, fresh out of high school, on the campus of Jersey City State College (since renamed New Jersey City University), officials told him that he couldn’t move into a dorm because he hadn’t completed the necessary paperwork. He stayed with his brother in the Bronx, commuting two or three hours a day to attend classes. “That wasn’t really sustainable,” he says.
After spending much of his first semester of higher education in a car, Maya transferred to Hunter College. There, things worsened. “I got really homesick. I felt lost. I didn’t know what to do,” he says. With no mentor to help him, Maya struggled. Transferring two more times, he eventually made his way to Northeastern University where, seven years after starting college, he finally earned a degree in accounting.
Today, Maya is an established professional. He mentors Olga Estephanie Menjivar Garcia, who was just 3 when her mother left Honduras and came to the United States “to find a better life for us.” More than a decade later, Olga, then 14, joined her mother here. The teen didn’t speak English, but she was good at math. She wanted to attend Boston’s John D. O’Bryant School of Mathematics & Science, but she didn’t understand the transfer process, and she didn’t ask for help. “I was very afraid. I didn’t want to owe anything to anyone. I like to help, but I didn’t like to ask for help,” says Olga, whose self-sufficiency earned her admission to Madison Park.
By the time she was a junior, she had conquered her aversion to seeking help. Olga enrolled in an SAT-preparation course, through which she learned about the College MAP program and eventually met Maya. “I feel like everything is connected. When I ask for help or get involved with other things, I get connected with other people,” she says.
A natural connection
Maya and Olga were simpatico from the start. Both have roots in Latin America; both have benefited from educational opportunities; and both have struggled to fit in. Early in Maya’s career, he was one of the few Latinos at EY, and he didn’t always feel included. He admits that some of the isolation was self-imposed, and he’s quick to affirm that the firm’s partners have been “amazing mentors and friends.” Olga says having Maya as a mentor “was very inspiring for me. He had a difficult time to get to where he is. I was also struggling.”
Writing her college essay was “a really difficult time. There was so much I wanted to say, and I really didn’t know how to.” Maya encouraged her to be more personal. He told her about his own essay, a letter in which he explained to his absent, alcoholic father that he had “turned out OK.” Inspired by that openness, Olga wrote honestly about “growing up without my mother and overcoming the language barrier.”
She won a full scholarship to attend Northeastern University, one of 10 students selected from almost 500 applicants to the university’s Torch Scholars Program. During a probationary period, she underwent a rigorous seven-week summer immersion program that tested her ability to perform at a high academic level. Once again, Olga had to prove that she belonged.
The program involved math classes, a seminar and a part-time job. It was “a bit stressful. I was losing confidence in myself,” says Olga, who shared her doubts with Maya via text message. “You’re a smart girl,” he’d text back. “You can do it.” The encouraging words helped keep her going, she says, adding: “I was a little bit afraid of disappointing him.”
She didn’t. Having survived the immersion program, she became a full-time college student. She just missed making the dean’s list for the fall semester, earning two As, one B+ and a C+. This semester, she’s taking Chemistry II, Calculus II, Biology, and College Writing. Her academic interest is behavioral neuroscience.
Helping his mentee overcome obstacles has helped Maya to undergo “a complete transformation” in his career. Mentoring had a lot to do with it, he says.
“I’m not just a tax professional,” he says. “I’m an EY employee who is part of the community. … When I look back on what was missing, the one thing that was missing was community service.”
