SPOTLIGHT ON MENTORING: VALERIE EARNSHAW AND HENRY TOMES
“I
had the wrong e-mail address so I inadvertently passed our deadline
for touching base,” 
junior
Valerie Earnshaw explained. “Then
I got an e-mail from Henry
Tomes, wondering why I hadn’t contacted
him. I thought it was really neat that even with his busy job, he remembered.”
That realization was especially gratifying for the psychology major who helped
to create the new Liberal
Arts mentoring program. After hearing a roommate
praise her own mentoring experience in engineering, Earnshaw, who was on
the Liberal Arts Undergraduate Council, pushed for a similar initiative.
“I wanted to give the student perspective, and
explain how valuable a mentoring program would be,” she recalls. “And the alumni were great. They
picked up the ball and ran with it.”
After thirty-five students were matched with alumni based on common interests,
Earnshaw and a few other psychology majors were left over: there were not enough
alumni in the pool of volunteers who were in the field of psychology. Organizers
of the mentoring program stepped in and asked Tomes if he would be interested
in mentoring a particular student and he agreed.
As Earnshaw met Tomes and went on a campus tour, she discovered that in his
position of Director of Public Interest for the American Psychological Association,
he worked as an advocate for minorities and women—areas of interest she
particularly wants to pursue. And if Earnshaw had any doubts that her new mentor
took his role lightly, she quickly revised her thinking.
“We had decided that each mentoring pair would
make their own guidelines on how often we make contact,” Earnshaw said. “This program is
making me proactive about my future since I know I’ll be talking to Henry
twice a month.”
And she knows that Henry Tomes will play an important role.