February 2018

On Saturday January 6^th, one of the coldest days in recent memory, almost 100 students and alumni mentors showed up to BlackRock in Midtown to attend the Stuyvesant Alumni Mentoring Program’s first-ever Life Skills Workshop.

Since its creation in 2014 by YanJie Hou ’06, the Mentoring Program has received great feedback from students for its role in teaching students how to draft their first resumes and prepare for interviews. But many students have asked if the Program can also help them develop other life skills ranging from networking and corporate etiquette to budgeting and cooking.

At the end of 2017, with the help of over a dozen eager alumni mentors who also agree that Stuyvesant students can benefit from having more life skills, Program Director Eleonora Srugo ’04 started brainstorming topics and modules for the Mentoring Program’s first Life Skills Workshop.

The Life Skills Workshop on January 6th ended up being four hours long with over a dozen different topics. Students were broken out into two groups. Group A sat in a series of lectures on:

• Email and calendar management (Eleonora)
• Corporate culture and professional etiquette (YanJie)
• Financial Planning
  • Budgeting and Spending (Flora Ng ’06)
  • Student Loans and Credit Scores (Michael Loebl ’05)
  • Saving, Investing, and Taxes (Gary Chalik ’06)

Meanwhile in smaller conference rooms outside of the main auditorium, Group B students rotated in 15-minute increments to work with different mentors who led interactive modules on:

• The Elevator Pitch (Bill Weiss ’80 and Richard Liang ’04)
• Greetings and Handshakes (Bo Xu ’05 and Ikram Hoque ’11)
• Small Talk (Michael Stern ’01)
• Networking (Justin Christopher ’03)
• General Q&A (Andrew Wong ’85, Wilson Chen ’05, and Jessie Wang ’06)

The workshop was a tremendous success – the students learned so much and had great fun practicing their new skills. The Alumni Association would like to thank all the alumni mentors who make this workshop and the Program possible. We would also like to thank Stuart Spodek ’88 and Jay Glickman ’06 for helping us secure BlackRock as a facility to conduct these sessions.

If you believe in the value and mission of the Mentoring Program, please donate to the Alumni Association’s General Fund! Your support allows us to provide the Mentoring Program to hundreds of students every year.