ALUMNI
Last winter, Johns Hopkins University launched the powerful and much anticipated platform OneHop Mentoring to make it easy for students to connect with alumni as potential mentors. And Peabody is fully on board. Peabody students are already participating in the universitywide flash mentoring program, in which they have immediate access to alumni who have created online profiles and are making themselves available for one-on-one conversations to answer specific career-related questions. And Peabody’s LAUNCHPad career team is unveiling a more formal mentorship program through OneHop Mentoring this fall. The new program matches third-year undergraduate and first-year graduate students with recent alumni in a relationship designed to last at least as long as the academic year — and perhaps a lifetime. “The idea is that recent alumni will really be able to identify with current students, having just gone through school and graduation themselves,” says LAUNCHPad Assistant Director Christina Manceor (MM ’17, Percussion). “And the alumni seem really excited about giving back to their fellow students and becoming part of a supportive community with the potential to benefit everyone involved.” The LAUNCHPad staff expects to match as many as 170 mentor/ mentee pairs, a project that would have been overwhelming before OneHop Mentoring. “OneHop Mentoring allows us to match students and mentors based on any number of factors, including their areas of study, personal interests and history, and even things like whether they speak a certain language fluently,” says Manceor. “We can use all of the factors students and alums include in their profiles to help connect students with mentors who might share and identify with
HOMEWOOD PHOTOGRAPHY
Inspiring Community Connections
Christina Manceor
their experiences in really special ways, something we did not have the ability to do before.” There are also plans to try to integrate the mentorship program into the foundational courses LAUNCHPad coordinates as part of Peabody’s Breakthrough Curriculum to prepare music students for 21st-century careers. Students might interview or brainstorm project ideas with their mentors, for instance. “The great thing about OneHop Mentoring is that it makes things so easy,” Manceor says. Students and alumni simply visit the Peabody Mentoring Program page, read the instructions, and click
on “Join Program” to get started. And students and alums can sign up for the flash mentoring program at onehop.jhu.edu/hub/mentoring. “Students are often so caught up in all that they have to do, they don’t have time to think about where they are going,” Manceor says. “Ideally, these connections will inspire new ideas, career possibilities that hadn’t even occurred to them, and greater confidence, not least because when they graduate they will already have a professional network and won’t feel entirely on their own.” — Joan Katherine Cramer
Christina Manceor discusses her work at Peabody and LAUNCHPad: bit.ly/3mhBcDd
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PEABODY
FALL 2020
