Grads Coaching Grads: The Victoria Alumni Mentorship Program

^{Arpita Ghosal (left) and Andrea Davidson (right) connected through the Vic Alumni Mentorship Program. (Photo by Will Dang)}

By Joe Howell

When Andrea Davidson Vic 1T6 applied to be a mentee in the Victoria Alumni Mentorship Program, she had just defended her PhD in children’s literature at the University of Antwerp in Belgium.

“I felt so lucky that my PhD supervisor gave me one year to work at the same university teaching,” she says. “But I didn’t know what I would do after that one year, especially living abroad. I wasn’t sure when I would move back to Canada or how to plan a career around that.”

Davidson read about the mentorship program in a Vic alumni newsletter and thought a mentor might help her face these “turning-point decisions.”

Now in its fourth year, the program is designed to help recent graduates of Victoria College do just that. Young alumni wondering about their next steps often benefit from the guidance of someone with relevant experience and interests, says Meghan Junke, mentorship co-ordinator and alumni liaison in the Office of Alumni Affairs & Advancement.

“They may be finishing their undergraduate degree and are trying to figure out whether to pursue graduate studies,” says Junke. “Maybe they’ve been in the workplace for a few years and are wondering if it’s time to look to move up or to move on. They could just be in a new phase of their career where they’re in more of a leadership role and are looking for guidance on managing people and bigger projects.”

Junke paired Davidson with mentor and fellow Vic alumna Arpita Ghosal, who has a PhD in English from the University of Toronto, teaches with the Toronto District School Board and is the founding editor of Sesaya Arts Magazine. Though the two lived an ocean apart and had never met in person, they formed a close friendship over video chats.

“I was really hoping to meet someone just like Arpita who had done a PhD and could reflect with me on the kinds of decisions they had to make afterwards,” says Davidson. “It was such a bonus that our interests aligned as well.”

Participating in the program “has been an amazing experience,” says Ghosal, crediting Junke’s matchmaking skills. “I don’t know what intuition Meghan had when she paired us up on paper, but she knocked it out of the park.”

Davidson was particularly interested in discussing job options outside of academia. “There are so many other ways that you can use your PhD,” she says. “I didn’t learn that from my PhD program—I really learned it from this mentorship program.”

Davidson now is the communications and engagement lead at SPARC Europe, an advocacy organization that strives to make science and education more accessible in the European Union. She still teaches English literature at the University of Antwerp while making time for creative writing, and recently published Eggenwise & Other Poems (The Emma Press, 2023).

She credits Ghosal with opening her eyes to new career paths: “There are a lot of opportunities that you just don’t know about until you get a bit of life experience,” says Davidson. “But with a mentor, you at least can have the benefit of someone else’s life experience.”

Ghosal is also profiling Davidson and her book in a forthcoming article for Sesaya Arts Magazine.

So what do busy mentors get out of sharing their time? Ghosal says she was motivated by both her love of teaching and a desire to give back to Victoria College.

She vividly remembers “the magical moment” during her undergraduate years when she received a letter saying she had won an award she hadn’t applied for. “It turned out I’d won a scholarship in Spanish literature granted by Victoria College, and it was awarded to me by Northrop Frye!”

Ghosal says she credits Vic with starting her journey. “But we didn’t have a mentorship program and there was much I had to learn on my own. I wanted to help somebody figure things out for themselves.”

There were moments when Ghosal wasn’t sure who was mentoring whom. “Andrea is an active scholar, and I’ve gone back to literary research very recently,“ she says. ”Andrea generously weighed in on the paper on LM Montgomery that I co-wrote and co-presented with my husband at a conference at the University of Prince Edward Island.”

Ghosal encourages other alumni to consider mentoring a more recent Vic grad. “I can’t imagine an experience topping what Andrea and I had this year,” she says. “I would not have had that if I hadn’t offered to become a mentor.”

To find out more about the Victoria University Mentorship Program, visit uoft.me/mentorship-program or email Meghan Junke, mentorship co-ordinator and alumni liaison, at meghan.junke@utoronto.ca.