By the fall of junior year, Mary Vitale ’11 was more than a little frustrated. The environmental engineering major had applied for numerous internships at consulting firms, only to end up in what she dubbed the “the human resources black hole.”
Enter John Helwig ’04, MSE environmental engineering, project engineer with the water management consulting firm Hazen and Sawyer, and a volunteer mentor with the Society of Engineering Alumni’s (SEA) new Mentoring Program. The two clicked immediately. “John set up a game plan for me,” explains Vitale, one of 15 Whiting School students who participated in the Mentoring Program’s inaugural year. “First we edited my resume, and he helped me pick classes.”
But it was Helwig’s networking savvy that made the biggest difference. He introduced Vitale to Hazen and Sawyer’s Baltimore office, where she recently completed an internship. “Now I know I want to pursue a consulting career,” says Vitale, who aims to complete her MSE in 2012. “My mentoring experience and internship have given me an edge.”
Helwig, who frequently volunteers at SEA’s career nights, has the interest and the empathy to be an effective mentor. “I had been in Mary’s spot, trying to build a career,” he says. “I didn’t have the networking opportunities afforded by SEA. It was dumb luck that I stumbled upon an internship in the first place. I certainly didn’t want any Hopkins student to go through what I had to go through.”
The match between alumni mentors and student mentees is key to the program’s success, notes Jim Beauchamp ’66, chair of the SEA’s Career Mentoring Committee subcommittee for One-to-One Mentoring. (Jackie Akinpelu, PhD ’80, chairs the Career Mentoring Committee.) “We spent a lot of time understanding what was important to students,” Beauchamp says of the subcommittee’s work.
Beauchamp ended up with three mentees: computer science students Brendan Ebers ’12 and Robert Douglas ’12, and Tom Smith ’11, a double major in cognitive science and anthropology. They were a perfect fit for Beauchamp’s experience as CEO and founder of Xxcelerate, a consulting firm specializing in early-stage tech companies. The three students are co-founders of Hopkins Buybacks, a company that resells textbooks using Web technology.
“The experience was exhilarating for me because they were students passionate about applying an idea to a real business opportunity,” Beauchamp explains of the numerous emails, phone calls, and meetings he has had with the budding businessmen. “I was amazed by their extreme creativity and ability to quickly understand business. I find that in the entrepreneur world, that’s the missing piece with technical people, but they were just magnets for knowledge.”
Michael Brenner, PhD ’63, also gave his talent and time to developing the mentoring program. Founder of Brenner Executive Resources Inc. and author of Executive Coaching for Managerial Excellence (Authorhouse, 2007), he used his expertise to develop a notebook and guidelines for mentors. As mentor to biomedical engineering student Chris Mihalsky ’10, Brenner offered insight into the job-hunting process and the consulting field.
Brenner believes that every Hopkins engineering student needs to minor in career management. “Current predictions show that today’s college graduates will have 10 to 15 jobs and three careers over their lifetime,” he notes. “The step from a university environment into the world of work is the biggest transition someone makes in their career. Hopkins students are bright, energetic, and high caliber, yet there is a huge amount they don’t know about the career-building process.”