Mentorships help students become T-shaped

Mentorships are one way to help students become more T-shaped, having real-world mentors, who guide student to work on real-world challenges, using real-world tools and data.   We hope to have more to say at the upcoming T Summit event about increasing industry mentorships of university students by 10x, and this might have a ripple effect leading to perhaps a 2x increase in internships (risk factor removed via better knowledge of top students from mentors).  We would also want to talk about a recognition system for industry-universities-and-professional-associations that help achieve the 10x and 2x numbers, and therefore more T-shaped graduates.  However, because industry mentors are busy people (and students are very busy too, along with their faculty!), we need to have good scripted templates, models, training for mentors, clear goals to evaluate mutual success, and more.   Working with ISSIP.org, Hult International Business School, IBM, and a Service Thinking course, we recently completed some pilots aimed at creating more T-shaped graduates.  We measured success on seven dimensions (students learn about industry offerings, learn about jobs, demonstrate understanding of applying course content to real-world challenges, improve their personal brand online, become more social media savvy, generate worthwhile outcomes for effort invested).   This is an example of some of the practical, hard-work we hope to stimulate with the upcoming T Summit event.  ISSIP.org is a new 21C umbrella professional association promoting T-shaped innovators from all other professional associations, and across academia, industry, governments, foundations, etc.

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