Inside Marquette Mentors — students’ guiding lights

Illustrations by Luke Best

As Marquette Mentors celebrates its 12th year, its growth deserves to be recognized for what it is: phenomenal.

The program that started as a pilot in 2013 with 30 students, each paired with an alumni mentor, reached 200 annual matches this year — an achievement stewarded by Dan DeWeerdt, Marquette Mentors’ Radtke endowed director and senior director of alumni engagement, and Assistant Director Cecilia Heffernan, Arts ’18, Grad ’22.

Since the pilot, more than 1,400 students have been matched with mentors across the country and in Europe. Recognized by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education for setting the “gold standard” in alumni-student mentorship, this Marquette University Alumni Association program from the Office of University Advancement continues to draw significant interest — this year alone, 550 students applied for the opportunity, and there’s another competitive waitlist full of alumni wishing to mentor, as almost all alumni return year after year.

Why is it so popular?

Part of the program’s success is its discipline: Students drive each pair’s conversations and goals, owning the relationship touchpoints and setting the course for the year. Mentors are Marquette alumni with memories of their student experiences and the seasoned perspective that comes from being established in their career for at least five years. That experience is vital to current undergraduates and graduate students hungry for career guidance.

“Students quickly understand this is an excellent professional development opportunity,” DeWeerdt explains. With their mentors, mentees have the floor to voice their goals, insecurities and curiosities with the best sounding board: highly successful professionals in the field they’re targeting.

Alumni engagement with students is one of the “defining characteristics” of the Marquette community, says Tim McMahon, vice president for university advancement. “And there is perhaps no better example of this than Marquette Mentors. It helps our students build important one-to-one relationships with alumni who care, who help them explore their strengths and lean into meaningful career and life pursuits.”

Raising their hands — it’s time to apply

When recently graduated senior Ahmoni Gonzalez first heard about Marquette Mentors, he assumed it was just another of Marquette’s 300-something programs and activities. The extroverted Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, native was already participating in more than half a dozen extracurriculars. But he ran into a friend at the fall student organization showcase, O-Fest, who persuaded him to apply. After hearing what it entailed, the then-sophomore knew the value a professional connection could bring, especially with law school applications on the horizon. “I’m first-gen for my entire family,” Gonzalez explains. “I’m trying to be a lawyer, and I don’t have any family who have been that.”

Rising senior Morgan Gallagher, an engineering student from St. Paul, Minnesota, has always known where she was going and how she was going to get there. There was just one problem: She needed to learn how to slow down.

“I came into Marquette wanting to run as fast as possible,” she explains. By her first semester, she’d declared her major: construction engineering. By her second, she’d planned out her entire course load for her tenure at Marquette.

As she found herself enjoying but rushing through college, a few insecurities had started to bubble to the surface. “I was really needing someone to talk to about my career path, who knew the engineering perspective, that wasn’t, well, my mom,” she says, “or professors who had their own bias and personal stake in me.”

She applied to Marquette Mentors right after Dr. Mark Federle, associate dean of the Opus College of Engineering, recommended it to all sophomores in the college. “If Dr. Federle is telling me to do this, it means I should definitely do it,” she says with a laugh.

This was her chance, Gallagher hoped, to get clarity on her next steps, such as deciding which company to choose for her participation in the college’s signature co-op program. She could learn from a professional who had been in her shoes before.

Committing — the interview

Gonzalez says he was sold on the program after the application asked him to wrestle with the question: Why will you make Marquette Mentors a priority? He hadn’t engaged this deeply with his other extracurriculars.

His interview with DeWeerdt and Heffernan further drove home the importance of committing to the mentoring relationship to make the most of the program. Despite being intimidated initially by the selectiveness of the program, he felt confident coming out of his interview. That’s no surprise to anyone who has experienced Gonzalez’s winning personality. “I’m an extroverted person, once you get me talking,” he says.

Similarly anxious, Gallagher remembers her nerves as she entered the interview, “I didn’t want to apply and not get in, you know?” she shares. Fortunately, not only did DeWeerdt and Heffernan put her at ease with their supportive tone, Gallagher’s intensity came across to her benefit. “I told them I’d be going home and immediately connecting with both of them on LinkedIn — I think they liked that!” she says with a laugh.

Becoming a pair — it’s a match

When DeWeerdt had approached Aleisha Jaeger, Eng ’03, years earlier about serving as a mentor, she felt a clear call to join. “I knew I was all in, and have been ever since,” she says. “I have a bit of a hand-raising disease when it comes to Marquette.”

Jaeger, a Chicago native, serves as director of engineering for foundational technologies, North America, at Kerry, “one of the largest sustainable nutrition and ingredients developers you’ve never heard of,” she says. With Marquette Mentors for 10 years, she credits her passion for mentorship in part to wishing she’d had a mentor during the early years of her own career.

“After graduating from Marquette, I was working in an office full of men, and I really felt outside of my element,” she says. “I connected with a professional community of women — a safe place to go ask life’s more curious questions. Since joining that group, it really lit a fire in me to work with young women in the industry.”

As DeWeerdt and Heffernan worked behind the scenes to match the year’s 185 pairs, they thought Jaeger’s personality and early career in construction engineering would make her a great mentor for Gallagher. Notified by email of her match, Gallagher was thrilled, immediately looking up Jaeger everywhere possible online.

Gonzalez was exactly the type of student that Harvey J. Anderson II, Eng ’84, retired chief legal officer and corporate secretary at HP, hoped to mentor. “With Ahmoni, I identified with his path because when I started out, I didn’t have any people in my world who were lawyers at all, who could say, ‘Here’s what it looks like, here’s what to watch out for, here’s what you don’t need to do,’” Anderson reflected early last December. “If you can’t see it, it’s hard to be it.”

Anderson was first-generation himself, a student in Marquette’s Educational Opportunity Program. By the time he met Gonzalez, Anderson had tied a bow on his multi-decade career at the intersection of law and tech, where he served in executive leadership for Silicon Valley mainstays like Mozilla, AVG and HP.

Anderson checked another box for Gonzalez, too — location. “It was really cool that the program was able to pair me not only with somebody who’s had all this experience in the field I want to go into, but also somebody geographically where I want to be, in California,” Gonzalez says. “After I was paired with him, I did a little internet digging, and I was very intimidated, because he’s done a lot and held an extremely high position. I thought, ‘Wow, this guy’s gonna be my mentor? That’s crazy.’”

Game, set, match — goal-setting

Many mentees meet their mentors for the first time at an on-campus kickoff breakfast, and then the pairs get to work. Their first one-on-ones are scheduled and discussions begin.

“I got on the phone with Harvey, and I was freaking out,” Gonzalez says, remembering his first call with Anderson. “But, at the bare minimum, we both went to Marquette, right? So, we talked about school a little bit, and that definitely eased my nerves. I realized, this guy’s pretty cool.”

A core element of Marquette Mentors is the student-led, mentor-guided process of setting goals and tracking progress. Student mentees are entirely responsible for driving the ship: What do they want to learn from their mentor? What is salient in their lives right now, where advice would be welcome? Are they debating adding a minor, deciding where to intern, or learning how to network? Gonzalez’s goals were to learn about the legal industry, potential job opportunities and law school choices, how to get experience in public policy, and what would be important for his law school application.

Anderson had a goal of his own, too. “I like to be someone mentees can add to their own personal board of trustees,” he said. “Someone that they can talk to about their growth and development and what they’re doing, to have a place to check in and get an opinion, and encouragement that they’re on a good path.”

“At that age, you have a lot of fear and uncertainty, a lot of anxiety over success or achievement — at least I did — and just knowing that someone sees what you’re doing and thinks you’re on a good path is everything,” Anderson said. “To say, I know you can’t see it all right now, but you know you can’t win the game in the first quarter, right? Someone to be there to give them some reassurance that they’re doing fine.”

While the pair often chatted in virtual meetings, Jaeger drove up from the Chicago area a handful of times to meet with Gallagher on campus over coffee. As for her goals, Gallagher had a few top priorities in mind. “My first goal was for her to help me review my co-op options. I was so lost,” Gallagher shares. Construction engineering majors must interview and choose a preferred company for their co-op; the firm then becomes their new home for the next three terms — often three sequential semesters or three summers. This is where student engineers gain valuable experience in industry, and effectively start their careers. Students can feel a lot of pressure to make the “right” decision.

“Aleisha ended up guiding me by not telling me what to do, not necessarily even holding my hand. She allowed me to bounce thoughts off of her, so I didn’t feel so alone going through the process,” Gallagher says.

Her mentor would channel what Gallagher needed back to her. “She’d say, ‘I care about you, and I care about what you care about, and I want to help you be successful in the way that you want to be successful,’” Gallagher says. Deploying the Socratic method was the key, gently posing Gallagher’s questions back to her for reflection. “It was the right kind of relationship for what I needed at the time,” Gallagher says.

Shadowing — the visit, the travel

Students in the program are encouraged to apply for a travel stipend, made possible by donations from mentors and former mentees, to visit their mentor and shadow them at work. Gonzalez got approved to travel to California, and Anderson graciously invited him to visit during spring break.

But they had a challenge: Anderson was retired. Instead of the traditional job shadow, he set up meetings with professionals in various legal fields, including a partner at the prominent firm Morrison Foerster, the vice president of intellectual property at Google, district attorneys, corporate lawyers and more. The trip provided a tremendous opportunity for Gonzalez to begin building professional relationships all across his field.
Meanwhile, the two continued to solidify their connection. Anderson said Gonzalez would join in surfing, family dinners and even daily ice baths. “He just fit right in,” Anderson said. “It felt like he was part of the family. When he left, I felt like one of my kids left and had gone back to school.”

Gonzalez says one particularly memorable moment from the trip was a conversation he had with Anderson. After he remarked about loving all the networking they were doing, Anderson advised, “Networking is a very transactional term. You should take with you in your life that you want to be building relationships with people.”

“Now I make a conscious effort to refer to it that way,” Gonzalez says. “It’s so much more valuable.”

Jaeger took Gallagher to Kerry’s North American headquarters in Beloit, Wisconsin, a unique facility containing smaller units of every national business function within one ecosystem — labs, research, production, you name it. “Our visit helped introduce her to the thought process she’ll go through in how she will build buildings in her career,” Jaeger says.

Gallagher enjoyed learning about a large-scale, multipurpose facility, saying, “I found it fascinating. I was taking classes on mechanical and electrical systems for buildings. We’re walking around a massive food processing plant and I’m asking them,
‘How do you guys even ventilate this space?’ Questions like that.”

Building a lasting connection

At program’s end, staff hold a grand finale where mentees and mentors gather to reflect, network, celebrate their successes and look to the future of their relationships.

“When I first met Morgan, she wanted to make sure everything for the next five years was checked off. And look, I was that way too,” Jaeger shares. “My focus became reinforcing with her: We prepare as best we can. You do what you can do, and you don’t have to have it all figured out.”

Gallagher confirms Jaeger’s advice rubbed off on her. “I’ve since slowed down and learned to appreciate everything more,” she says. “After matching with Aleisha, I realized how grateful I was to have her as my mentor. Everything I was nervous or curious about, she had a way of reassuring me or providing an answer.”

“Morgan’s a rock star. I’m just really proud of her,” Jaeger says. “It fills my cup to be a part of Mentors. It’s a small way of making a difference for them, but I get in return this feeling of community that’s so obviously Marquette.”

After the program ended, the two still caught up on campus at their usual place — over coffee in The Brew in the Alumni Memorial Union. “We have a less hands-on relationship now,” Gallagher says, “but I know I can reach out to her if I have something going on. I like knowing I always have her in my corner.”

“It’s odd now to think we ever called them ‘one-on-ones,’ because Harvey and I technically still had those, even after my official time with the program was over,” Gonzalez says. “But it was just a phone call to a friend, really.”

The graduating senior was in Washington, D.C., this spring participating in the Les Aspin Center for Government program, something Anderson encouraged. Not surprisingly, the two texted regularly and would catch up monthly before Anderson’s passing. Gonzalez remembers the messages they exchanged the day he returned from his California visit. “I let Harvey know when I touched down in Milwaukee, and thanked him for everything. He replied, ‘The fam misses you.’ It felt like I was leaving home.”

“Harvey was an amazing man, and I’m so glad to have gotten as close with him as I did,” Gonzalez says. “He was a beautiful soul and a brilliant guy, and he made everyone and everything he was around better. The world needs more people like him.”