More Than Just a Summer Job

Students and staff involved in the Leadership Rice Summer Mentorship Experience are emphatic that the jobs students land through the program are no ordinary internships. They do offer important career skills, but participants get a lot more out of them than just the quantifiable abilities that build a resume..

Kathryn Hunter can attest to that. The junior English major calls her mentorship a life-changing experience. “I was once the kind of person who stayed quiet in meetings, never volunteered for things, and avoided public speaking like the plague,” she explains. “But now I speak up without even thinking twice. I’ve learned that my opinion counts for something and that I can handle myself well—even when things go wrong.”

The Summer Mentorship Experience is one of the foundations of Leadership Rice, a program created in 1996 to help undergraduate students develop leadership capacities. The mentorships, says Leadership Rice director Susan Lieberman, are the “experiential component of a carefully structured theory to practice, ideas to action, head to heart curriculum” that is presented in the fall course UNIV 309. The course is a prerequisite for the summer mentorships.

Leadership concepts are introduced in the class, which is taught by Lieberman and adjunct lecturers, such as George Martinez ’63, chair of Sterling Bank. Some of the course topics include building powerful and effective teams, theories of leadership, and integrity. Debbie Diamond, assistant director for external programs for Leadership Rice, describes the class as a combination of lectures and discussion. “Susan tries to present leadership concepts and capabilities to students to help them develop their own vision of leadership,” she explains. “It’s very thought provoking because we don’t teach one right way to be a leader.”

Leadership Rice focuses more on teaching for leadership than about leadership, Lieberman explains. “We are always looking for ways for students to ‘own’ what we teach, so an important part of the course are the team projects that afford students the chance to practice the behaviors discussed in the classroom, like the art of meeting facilitation, effective requests, and brainstorming.”

Teams, which consist of about eight students each, sometimes collaborate with an outside organization on a project, but often they develop and carry out their own ideas. Some examples of team projects include the Taste of the Town event that brought local restaurants to campus last spring and marketing efforts for the Main Event, an outdoor party held on Main Street in downtown Houston.

While the team projects introduce students to real-world leadership practices, the summer mentorships are an even more immersive experience. Not all students who enroll in UNIV 309 choose to apply for a mentorship, but those who do must go through an interview process, which gives them skills in that area but also allows them to be placed in jobs that best match their interests. Because Leadership Rice students represent many majors, the mentorship menu must be diverse. While about half the mentorships are with Houston companies and nonprofit organizations, Leadership Rice also sends students to organizations in New York, Boston, Washington, D.C., and international locations. Students have worked at such places as the United Nations, Houston Endowment, Inc. and Baylor Teen Clinic and for ABC’s news program 20/20. The eight-week-long mentorships include a $3,000 stipend.

Leadership Rice seeks mentors who are effective, ethical, and successful and who are willing to offer students both substantive work and engagement, Lieberman notes. “What makes the mentorships really unique,” adds Natalia Ksiezyk, assistant director of Leadership Rice, “is that we’re able to place students with individuals who are very high in their organizations, so they’re able to see a different kind of work environment than if they were just doing busy work.”

Hunter completed her summer mentorship with Amigos de las Américas, a Houston-based nonprofit organization that sends high school and college students to Latin America to assist with community projects. She worked for the international office’s training director on several important projects, including reprinting the organization’s recruitment brochures, facilitating a “crash course” for college student-volunteers, and planning a training trip to Nicaragua. At the end of her mentorship, Hunter traveled to the Central American country, her first trip out of the United States.

“Going into the Leadership Rice Summer Mentorship Experience was one of the best things I could have done here at Rice,” Hunter says. “I didn’t go into it really wanting to be a leader, but I think somewhere along the way, it happened.”

Hunter says she is more confident and balanced, and she learned that being a leader isn’t necessarily about success, money, and feeling important. “I met many people this summer, both at the Houston office and in Nicaragua, who have lived lives that are anything but ‘by the mold.’ I realized that I don’t have to go from point A to B to C in order to get where I want to go. I’ve realized that I don’t even have to know where it is I’m going yet.”

Since completing her mentorship, Hunter has decided to cut back on her course load and not to pursue a double major she never was truly interested in. Instead, she has taken on new campus leadership roles, including serving as a teaching assistant in the UNIV 309 course, president of Rice Crew, and writing consultant for the English department.

“Leadership Rice won’t have the same effect for everyone,” Hunter notes. “I believe I might be an extreme case.” But, in fact, other students do have similarly positive experiences. Cielo Contreras, a senior sociology major, has completed two summer mentorships through Leadership Rice, both at Ashoka, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that encourages social entrepreneurship globally by supporting fellows who work to affect change in their communities.

“The mentorships,” Contreras says, “were everything I expected and more. I felt like a real member of the staff during both of them and not at all like just some intern that they put in the corner to make copies and do filing. I always felt like I was really contributing to Ashoka.” Some of the projects she handled during her two mentorships included researching corporate philanthropy in Europe, assisting in selecting fellows, planning events, and helping to establish a new Ashoka office in Madrid.

“Ashoka’s work can be difficult to understand at first,” she explains, “so one of the most important lessons I learned was how to deal with ambiguity. I had to push back my fears of looking dumb and just ask seemingly stupid questions when I didn’t understand something.” This was one of the lessons that was presented in UNIV 309, Contreras adds, and it helped that she had been introduced to how to deal with ambiguity beforehand.

Derrick Matthews, president of the student association, also participated in the Summer Mentorship Experience twice, working at Healthcare for the Homeless–Houston and Christus St. Joseph Hospital. “My mentorships,” he says, “hit home the point that leadership is more than a nice word or intangible concept. It is very broad and multifaceted, and it’s incredibly important at all times to have an effective team or organization.”

But the mentorships also were important to Matthews because they helped him redefine his career goals. Matthews had always planned on majoring in a biological science and attending medical school, but during his sophomore year, he started to feel a lack of motivation to carry out this goal. “My friends who had previously gone through the program told me that Dr. Lieberman was excellent at placing students into mentorships not necessarily where they wanted to be, but where they needed to be.” Matthews is now a senior English major, and he plans to attend graduate school to study public health.

Students who complete summer mentorships reflect on their experiences in essays that are compiled into a Leadership Rice publication called Living It. Often poignant and funny, the essays are written in response to weekly emails from the Leadership Rice staff in which students are asked to consider certain topics, like ambiguity, strengths and weaknesses, listening skills, and making mistakes in the workplace. The responses go to a small group of peers as well as to Leadership Rice staff, and students know they will hear from someone quickly if the need for coaching or encouragement is detected.

Perhaps the best thing about the campus leadership initiative, says Ksiezyk, a 2001 Rice graduate who participated in Leadership Rice, is that students don’t have to wait until they build careers to put their lessons to use. “The most amazing thing,” she says, “was that the things I learned in the Leadership Rice class that also were reinforced in the mentorship were things that happened everywhere, in every type of work environment, and also in my personal life. Leadership Rice offers life skills, and you can start using them right away; you don’t have to wait until you’re in a leadership role.”

Students often continue to be involved in Leadership Rice after their summer mentorships are complete by assisting with the UNIV 309 course and other Leadership Rice projects, participating in Leadership Rice Alumni Association events, and contributing financially to the Participants’ Fund. Lieberman often tells students, “Once you’re part of Leadership Rice, you’re always part of Leadership Rice.”

— Dana Benson