Until last week, Alexander Adkins was just another curious Psychology major looking for some direction.
A College sophomore, Adkins says he's interested in law but wasn't sure how to combine that with his major - or what exactly he should do to pursue a career in either field, for that matter.
For students like Adkins, the College of Arts and Sciences has been piloting the College Alumni Mentoring Series program over the past year and officially launched the series this fall, with both mentoring lunches and thematic evening programs.
After receiving an e-mail last week about the CAMS meetings, Adkins went to the program's premiere mentoring lunch.
What he discovered was great food but, more importantly, great insight from a Penn alumnus.
At the event, Adkins dined with 1974 College and 1977 Penn Law alumnus James Johnson, who currently works in the administration of Boeing Corporation, the world's largest airplane manufacturer.
Seven other undergraduates joined Adkins at the event, and School of Arts and Sciences officials say that, as CAMS gains publicity, it will continue to grow.
"The program is in its first year, but the idea is to give students in the College who don't necessarily go on to graduate school an idea of what career paths are leading out of college," College Dean Dennis DeTurck said.
Other CAMS-sponsored events include intimate dinners and large panel discussions between alumni and current students.
DeTurck noted that faculty "don't have much direct experience with the corporate world," so alumni act as informative mentors for undergraduate students.
But this program certainly isn't the only way for undergraduates to get advice about their futures.
Another mentoring program already in existence is the Graduate/Undergraduate Mentoring Program, which currently boasts a membership of 134 undergraduates and 380 graduate volunteers.
A primary feature of that program is Cawfee Tawk, which provides gift cards to local coffee shops to facilitate the interaction between Penn's undergraduate and graduate students.
In this case, graduate students are called upon to provide a service similar to the alumni's.
"It was good to talk with someone who had gone through the anxiety and hard decisions and had come through unscathed," Engineering senior Noel Camacho, a Cawfee Tawk participant, wrote in an e-mail.
And the benefits that Camacho enjoyed are exactly the goals of the four-year-old mentoring program.
"Grad students remember being in the same position [as undergraduates]. . Grad students want to offer advice from their own personal experience," said Sarah Salwen, a Political Science graduate student who is a mentoring fellow at the graduate center.
Mentor and Wharton MBA candidate Michael Stone agreed.
"It's an opportunity to gain insight from grad students who have been there and done certain careers, and also who have been undergrads and can empathize," Stone said.
