Alumni Mentor FAQs

Yes – we encourage all alumni to consider joining Royal Holloway Connect and becoming a mentor, regardless of age or experience. Your support can be valuable to students/alumni at any point in your career.

You can join Royal Holloway Connect here: www.royalholloway.alumni.community    

All of our alumni can offer a unique perspective on how to progress after graduating.

If you are at the start of your career journey you are likely to have direct experience of the types of applications and interviews our most recent graduates will be facing, being a mentor to one of these students could give them the edge and help them to succeed faster.

Alternatively, if you’re established in your field or industry, your expert knowledge can offer a completely different perspective on how to succeed.   

Put simply, the role of a mentor is to share your expertise and experience to help support your mentee. This can take many different forms from checking a CV or application, providing one-off support via email or video chat, exchanging regular emails, or speaking regularly, right through to offering work experience or an internship to your mentor.

You're not there to offer professional career advice, but instead, be a friendly face who is able to offer real-life experience relevant to the aspirations of your mentee.

How much support (and time) you are able to offer as a mentor is really up to you. Through Royal Holloway Connect you can choose the support you are able to offer and set limits on how many mentees can request your help.

If you are able to support a mentee by offering longer-term advice we ask mentors to commit to a minimum of one hour per month, although this may not be in a one hour block each month.

When you speak to your mentee for the first time you can use our helpful guides to arrange the frequency and duration of your meetings. 

Currently, our recent graduates (those that have graduated in the last two years) can sign up to be mentees. As a mentor you will support a recent Royal Holloway graduate as they make their first steps after university. 

As Royal Holloway Connect develops we will invite current students to become mentees.

Mentees will be able to search for a mentor who is best placed to help them, this could be based on the subject you both studied or could be because you work in an industry the mentee is interested in.

Mentees will request your support through Royal Holloway Connect. As a mentor, you can choose to accept or deny the request for help. As a general rule, we ask you not to deny a mentee's request without asking for some more information or explaining why you think another mentor would be better able to help.  

Although we will do our best to find encourage mentees to reach out to all of our mentors, this is not always possible as demand varies. To maximise the likelihood of a mentee getting in touch make sure your profile is completed fully and is up to date.

We are very grateful for all our mentors support, as Royal Holloway Connect grows there will be more demand so please keep your contact details up to date an eye out for an email letting you know you have a request from a mentor.

There are also other opportunities for you to be involved with that allow you to still share your career journey such as a website profile, being a guest speaker or offering work experience. We will be happy to discuss other options with you too if you are interested. 

You can stop mentoring at any time, however, we ask that you let your mentee know if you are not going to be able to continue the relationship.
You should also ‘pause’ or ‘withdraw’ your mentor profile so that it will not be able to be viewed by mentees. If your circumstances change or you change your mind then you can re-join the programme at a later date.