Elisha’s story
My GCSEs were during the pandemic, so when it came to sit my A Levels, I hadn’t done exams before. It was really stressful. But thankfully, my Brightside mentor gave me lots of good advice. He was reassuring and told me to sit for a minute then do the best I could. Â
Mentoring was my first opportunity to make decisions. I didn’t know what sort of degree I wanted to study, whether I wanted to stay near home or go away, anything. Â
It turned out I had a lot of misunderstandings about uni and my mentor cleared them all up for me. He told me about calculating UCAS points, sent me links to careers quizzes and the 16 personalities test, and gave me advice about accommodation and student finance. He sent me a video he’d made about essay writing on his course, and I still use it now. He even introduced me to coding!Â
It was really convenient to do online mentoring all on my phone. I didn’t have a lot of free time alongside college, so it was great to be able to text my mentor on the bus. Â
His advice was the foundation I built everything else on. Â
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Mentee stories
Daniel’s story
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.
