For Helenia Quince and Isabella Brown, their meetings with one another were the highlight of their week.
The two connected every week or so during the fall semester, meeting in campus buildings, nearby coffee shops, and occasionally online. They talked about school — Quince is a fifth-year PhD candidate in Social Welfare, and Brown is a senior — and about life. They discovered that years earlier, they’d taken a UW–Madison dance class together when they did not yet know one another.
And of course, they talked about graduate school. Brown will earn her bachelor’s degree in psychology and legal studies in May and wants to pursue a Master of Social Work degree next. Her advisor recommended she try the GRADLINK Mentorship Program to connect with a graduate student in the field.
“I’m a first gen college student, so none of my family have been in college or gone to grad school,” Brown said. “It was something that I was going to have to pretty much figure out on my own.”
Once GRADLINK matched her and Quince, Brown was no longer on her own when looking at possible schools of interest, fine-tuning her application essay, or searching for financial support for graduate study. She said it was great to have someone experienced as a sounding board for her questions or uncertainties.
“That helped me talk myself through what I wanted to do,” Brown said.
Quince volunteered as a mentor while also receiving training and support through a Research Mentor Learning Community with the Delta Program in the Graduate School. She was excited about the chance to talk to someone younger who’s interested in her field. During the process, Quince had a chance to share things she’s learned that she wishes she’d known sooner.
“I’m thinking about some of the things that come up for me in my own program right now as a graduate student and the hidden curriculum – things that I learned four years down the road that if I had known my first year in the program, it would have changed the game,” Quince said.
For Brown, it was invaluable to hear Quince’s expertise as a grad student and as a social worker.
“It was nice to be introduced to areas of social work that I didn’t know were possible, or more information on the areas of social work that I was already interested in, or possibilities of intertwining the two,” Brown said.
Throughout the semester, Brown and Quince said their meetings stayed flexible – in timing and in the wide-ranging topics they covered.
“We built the rapport and that made it more comfortable to meet every week and like chat a little bit about life and then go, okay, well, while we’re talking about this, let’s talk about grad school kind of thing,” Brown said.
Quince agreed. “It almost felt like building a friendship at the same time as having a mentor relationship and that was fantastic.”
The Graduate Readiness, Access, and Discovery Mentorship Program, or GRADLINK, is a partnership between the Delta Program in the Graduate School and the Center for Academic Excellence (CAE) in the College of Letters and Science.
Based on each student’s goals and interests, GRADLINK matches undergraduates interested in graduate school with a graduate student or postdoc who is currently engaged with mentor training with the Delta Program. Delta’s Research Mentor Learning Communities offer evidence-based curriculum that gives participants tools to be effective and inclusive mentors. Mentors are learning strategies that promote mentee’s confidence and independence and foster a sense of belonging.
Hernan Rodriguez, an advisor at the Center for Academic Excellence who leads the program along with Jules Whitaker in the Delta Program, said the individualized matching helps set up mentors and mentees for success.
“The nature of GRADLINK is intended to be flexible and encourage participants to co-create a meaningful experience,” Rodriguez said. Throughout fall semester, other mentors connected their mentees to wider professional networks, organized tours of research labs to familiarize undergraduates with different research methods, and much more – including simple peer to peer encouragement.
CAE Director Karen Stroud-Phillips said that while they’ve had a long-standing collaboration with SuccessWorks to help students meet their career goals, GRADLINK expands the resources for students considering graduate school.
“Because many CAE scholars are the first in their families to attend college and/or to consider an advanced degree, access to mentorship from current graduate students provides invaluable insight,” Stroud-Phillips said. “This partnership helps demystify the graduate school experience and strengthens students’ understanding of the admissions process, funding opportunities, research pathways, and the culture of graduate education as a whole.”
Quince, the graduate student mentor, said the research mentor learning community offered through the Delta Program helped her be an adaptable, flexible mentor to Brown. “It felt like it was helping me have a framework of being more collaborative than, maybe, I would have been without doing the program,” she said.
“If anyone’s considering doing this program, I highly recommend it because it’s a joy to get to meet with people,” Quince added.
Graduate students and postdocs, want to get involved with GRADLINK?