By JUSTIN WORLAND
News editor
This past summer a number of Upper School students and several young alumni participated in PolyConnect. The Alumni Association launched the program two years ago with the goal of linking current Poly students with professionals in the Poly community.
The range of student participation varied greatly; some students chose to shadow their mentor for a day in order to learn about his or her profession while others took on full internships, which entailed the responsibilities of a paid position.
John Horn, ’78, a Poly alumnus who currently serves on the Alumni Association’s board of directors, first envisioned the program as a way to allow “Poly’s vast and diverse circle of adults” to benefit students directly. He cites his own experience shadowing at the Los Angeles Times during his senior year at Poly as an inspiration for this program. Horn sees the opportunity to spend time with a mentor in a particular field as an invaluable opportunity for someone considering entering that profession. Years after his two weeks shadowing at the Los Angeles Times, Horn is now a staff writer at that same newspaper.
The enthusiastic response from the adults in the Poly community suggests that many people share Horn’s sentiments. More than 300 people have offered to serve as mentors to date. This group is incredibly diverse in terms of both the variety of locations they hail from and the multitude of professions they represent. Poly students can choose to work with mentors in more than 25 states as well as four foreign countries. The mentors’ fields vary from acoustics to government to writing.
After expressing her interest in the medical profession, PolyConnect linked senior Adela Wu with alumna Stefani Takahashi who runs Camp Wonder, a weeklong summer camp for children with genetic skin diseases. Wu took the opportunity to serve as a counselor and later described it as “an incredible and rewarding experience.”
“I was blown away by the overwhelming warmth and closeness of the Camp Wonder community; everyone (the camp staff, doctors, counselors, campers, volunteers) was quite literally part of one huge family,” Wu recalled after returning home from the camp.
While not stated explicitly as one of the goals of the program, Wu’s experience is a large part of what Horn hopes to achieve. He says, “I never looked at PolyConnect as some sort of job fair. I see it as an opportunity to put like-minded people in the same room, to give Poly students a chance to see what kind of possibilities exist beyond (and sometimes during) high school and college.”
A member of the class of 2008, Chloe Gaffney took on a paid internship at Poly parent Tina Thomson’s public relations firm Tina Thomson Communications. During the internship, Gaffney had a number of responsibilities that allowed her to learn more about the intricacies of public relations, including writing press releases, writing media alerts, press event coordination, media follow up and booking travel.
Thomson agrees with Horn in his belief that mentoring is an essential experience for anyone looking to enter a new field. She says, “I’m a big believer in mentoring. There is a mentor of some kind behind every accomplished person. Somewhere, somehow, someone made an impact.”
Horn also sees the program as being a valuable experience for the mentors involved. While he acknowledges that many adults do not initially see this benefit, he continues on to say that “[Mentoring] is rewarding and, from my experience, quite touching for people not familiar with current students and recent grads to see how amazing Poly kids can be.”
Looking to the future, Horn would like to encourage potential students and mentors to sign up: “The program will only grow stronger as more mentors and more students sign up. The more, the merrier.”
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