Northwestern Women in Business and the Kellogg School of Management Women’s Business Association held a mentor-mentee meetup for its members Tuesday in the Kellogg Global Hub.

The program matches WIB students with Kellogg students, who give advice on topics such as career choice and self-advocacy in male-dominated fields. This year, the organizations also started matching WIB underclassmen with upperclassmen to increase opportunities for undergraduates. The groups also started accepting male Kellogg mentors. 

WIB and WBA matches were based on the criteria mentees marked most important, ranging from topics like shared identities to shared hobbies.

“Finding people with similar identities to bond with and lead me is really important to me,” Weinberg sophomore and WIB member Riley Rendino said.

WIB co-President and Weinberg junior Phoebe Cahill said she hopes to collaborate more with Kellogg in the future.

WBA mentorship and alumni vice president and second-year Kellogg student Tina Watkins said that it’s important for Kellogg students to be involved with the undergraduate NU community. She views the mentorship program as a special way to give back to the University.

“We have all of these students here who have already done some interesting stuff in their career and have faced a lot of the challenges that undergraduates are facing now or will face as they look for jobs and enter the workforce,” Watkins said.

WBA is Kellogg’s largest affinity group and focuses on empowering women and other marginalized genders, according to mentorship and alumni first-year director and first-year Kellogg student Alexandria McGowan.

The group focuses not just on professional skills, but also personal development, which Watkins also appreciated.

“I started as a project manager in tech, and I often felt like I was in a sea of men, not really sure how to make myself known and how to gain respect,” McGowan said. “And so for me, in particular, having women that I looked up to that I could use as a sounding board with questions or just go to for advice was super important.”

Kellogg student and mentor Cheshtha Gupta said she was “overwhelmed” with support from the Kellogg community and wanted to help undergraduate students with recruitment after being hired.

Multiple graduate students at the event said their old mentors had written them letters of recommendation for their Kellogg applications and that they wanted to extend the same help to younger students.

WIB co-President and Weinberg junior Michelle Yu said her mentor helped her find opportunities and conducted mock interviews with her. She said her mentor also helped her decide to pursue a career in consulting.

Kellogg student and mentor Akshita Singh said she was inspired by her own mentoring experience at her last company.

“I mostly work in male-dominated fields and I found it intimidating (and) a bit demotivating to not have a female mentor to look up to,” Singh said. “I figured it was a good time to get that sorted (out for other women).”

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Twitter: @kaavya_butaney

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