I’m now a total nerd about mentoring. I talk about it all the time! 

Mentoring was so important for me, especially during a lockdown where you only see the people you already know. You get to connect with someone you’d never speak to outside of school and that’s really important because it forces you out of your comfort zone.

From my perspective, the biggest challenge facing young people today is deciding what career path to go down. Between Year 8 and Year 10 I changed my mine five times; I wanted to be a detective, zoologist, chef, doctor and lawyer.

I only had a vague idea of what I wanted to do after GCSE and I had no idea where to start. I was interested in aviation, zoology and conservation but after that I was lost. I didn’t know if you needed a degree or an apprenticeship and I wasn’t sure which path to choose. Mentoring was a very useful tool to help with this; it gave me a push to start looking at new things.

My mentor was lovely; we bonded over our pets and that made me feel more connected to her. She made me feel calmer about applying via UCAS and the interviews process. It was so easy to talk to her because she’s not much older than me.

I always wonder whether I’d be thinking or feeling the same about university if there wasn’t a pandemic. I completely lost that in-person interaction and was struggling with the UCAS application because of it. But then, if there hadn’t been the pandemic, I wouldn’t have been able to do the virtual work experience and use the Brightside platform.