Student Mentoring Program Enters 17th Year
By: Dan Voss and Mike Murray
STC Fellows
Florida Chapter, STC
Welcome to the second installment of Looking Back, Looking Forward, a new column that appears periodically in Memo to Members. This column showcases articles and other documents generated by members of the STC Florida Chapter over our community’s 41-year history that still bear relevance to our community’s operations today and into the future.
In our September 2019 LBLF column, we are looking back at three articles that captured the establishment and growth of the STC Florida Chapter’s benchmark student mentoring program, co-sponsored with the Future Technical Communications (FTC) club at the University of Central Florida (UCF).
The highly successful program, founded in 2003 by the Orlando Chapter with FTC and UCF, is presently looking forward to its 17th year, about to get underway under the guidance of Education Committee manager Misty Arner and FTC president and chapter liaison Amy Truong.
In its first 16 years, the student mentoring program has generated 141 mentor/mentee pairings in which professional practitioners within the chapter have guided technical communication students at UCF as they have embarked on their careers.
It’s a Quadruple Win!
The student mentoring program has proven to be a win-win situation both personally and organizationally. Mentees get valuable practical professional development advice and job placement assistance they are not likely to get in the classroom. Mentors get the satisfaction of helping groom the next generation of technical communicators and they also benefit from seeing what ideas newcomers bring to the industry. The UCF technical communications (tech comm) program and FTC benefit from the professional expertise of many of our chapter members. And our chapter is assured of a steady pipeline of fresh volunteer talent that has played a major role in the extraordinary success of our community over the past 17 years.
You can read about the student mentoring program under the Education tab on our chapter website. Over the years, it has been emulated by several other STC geographic communities. The program guidelines and the various tools used to administer the program are available to all STC communities in the Community-Building Toolkit on our website.
Reaching Out to UCF
The first article about our mentoring program, “Bridging the Gap Between Industry and Academe,” was written by its co-founders, Orlando Chapter Education Committee Manager Dan Voss and FTC President Bonnie Spivey. The article was published in the Proceedings to the 52nd international STC conference (now called the Summit) in Seattle in 2005, in conjunction with a presentation delivered by Bonnie and Dan.
Reaching Across the Atlantic
The second article, «Un Programme de Mentorat International? Mais Oui, C’est Possible! Absolument!», tells an inspiring story of a trans-Atlantic virtual mentoring partnership that led directly to the establishment of a student mentoring program between the STC France Chapter and the University of Paris-Diderot modeled on the “Orlando model.” Coauthored by STC France Secretary Clio Fouque, then a student at the University of Paris, and Dan Voss, who met at the 56th international STC conference in Atlanta in 2009, the article was published in the Proceedings to the 57th international STC conference in Dallas in 2010. Clio and Dan’s mutually enriching and organizationally fruitful mentoring partnership offers a promising paradigm as our student mentoring program seeks to add a virtual dimension as it extends to other universities in Florida over the next several years.
Reaching Across the Society
The third article, “STC Student Mentoring Programs: Investing in the Future,” was written by Bethany Bowles and Dan Voss for the 15th annual STC-India conference in Varca, Goa, in 2013, and published in the STC-India newsletter Indus in third quarter 2013. The article recaps the history of our chapter’s student mentoring program and chronicles Bethany and Dan’s 3-year tour of duty with the Society’s Committee Affairs Committee (CAC) as task leaders in the student member outreach program. The pair co-presented at Leadership Day at the 59th and 60th international STC conferences in Toronto in 2012 and Atlanta in 2013, respectively—in both cases distributing both printed and soft media copies of a comprehensive reference guide on student mentoring programs that other STC geographic communities have used to establish and sustain student mentoring programs.
Coming Attraction:
Watch for the next installment of Looking Backing, Looking Forward in the November edition of Memo to Members, where we’ll be looking at communication strategy past, present, and future.