Mentoring thinkers and leaders

As much as mentors like myself laugh about having the chance to play with cool toys in the kit of parts, and keep our skills up to par in areas that we might not practice in our professions, mentoring is very much a challenge of passing on knowledge and inspiring young women.

Castilleja robotics is a very special team of bright young women, who have conviction. With the crazy rush of a college prep high school, this is, first and foremost, why I don’t give up when it gets really hard. And trust me - sometimes it gets really hard with this team. It is an incredibly special thing for a teenager to have that much passion and conviction for something other than drugs, sex and rock and roll these days.

Gatorbotics was born out of the thinking the team would be, as much as possible, a student-run team. I entirely support that. I believe in ‘women leading, women learning’. But the difficulty therein comes when the students themselves aren’t aware of what they don’t know. Designing, engineering and building a robot is not as simple as getting together and making brownies. There are a lot of skills required in the process that aren’t part of every day life, that a young woman would not necessarily learn at school or in the household. That’s why we introduce robotics; exactly because the things the students learn in this experience are NOT commonplace. My frustration comes often when students want to make Baked Alaska and they don’t realize that they need a costly deep freezer and a blow torch to do it. And even tougher, because there is such a strong spirit of the team being student-run, the students may not ask for feedback, and I sometimes hesitate to suggest the alternatives or point out the failings, because I do not want to lessen their enthusiasm.

In my short quarter century existence on this earth, I have realized that leaders are good followers as well. I mentor these young women, but I myself have mentors who I check in for advice regularly. Great leaders are capable of doing, but also listening, and seeing the big picture of what is going on. Great leaders are also, more importantly, able to make each and every member of their team feel proud of their contributions – which begins by learning how to delegate, which is, more importantly, preceded by knowing what needs to be done. How to teach this skill I do not know, except by example and with encouragement.

Confucius said: "It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness." It is painstaking to light these candles one by one, but only with loving care and time will it happen. There are no limits and helping these young women break those often self-perceived boundaries is really important to me. When a young woman realizes that she CAN do something and goes beyond what we expect, it is incredibly fulfilling to me. That’s what will make me go back every single time.

A lot of this has been on my mind and now I can go back to work.

Writing from a place where PWM stands better for Pretty Wild Magic,

Emily