Photo courtesy of APB
Story by Janae Cotton/Contributing Writer
As a start to National Women’s History Month, Loretta Stokes, Director of Engineering at Eventbrite, held a lecture at MTSU’s Science Building on Monday, March 2nd.
Stokes opened her lecture stating that she is a devoted mom, mentor and manager. From there, she continued to introduce her presentation on the topic of “Mentoring in Motion.” She is on the board of “Women Get It,” a mentoring group that encourages young women to find mentors. As an experienced mentor herself, Stokes passed on her knowledge of what to look for in a mentor and why it’s so important to have one.
Stokes’ three main topics were about how to find your mentor, building your network and establishing your mentor relationship.
A mentor is a person who has much knowledge experience and who helps guide a less experienced and less knowledgeable person. With that definition set, Stokes’ first piece of advice was how important it is to find someone who you want to be like; someone who has the same passion as you and that you want to seek advice from or who can help you succeed.
Stokes also talked about building your network. As college students, it is important to get to know people in your career field that have the same goals as you. Networking is also a good way to find a mentor who has a similar passion to you. Stokes stated, “You will only go as far in your career as your network will take you.”
Once you’ve networked and found a mentor that can help you achieve your goals, Stokes believes it’s important to build on that relationship with your mentor. As a mentee it is necessary to know what you want out of the relationship. Once you’ve established that, it is then up the mentee to schedule frequent meetings with your mentor to allow the relationship to blossom.
To close out the lecture, Stokes had a volunteer come up and practice meeting with someone to demonstrate the types of questions you would ask a potential mentor. The audience found this demonstration to be very helpful, as the talk left many confident to go out and find a mentor for themselves.
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