For more than 20 years, from 1990 until 2014, alumni and friends and family from PANE participated in a mentoring program at the Muriel S Snowden International School at Copley, a unique district public school on Newbury St. in the Back Bay, which is available to all Boston high school students by lottery, where the students take a serious 4-year load of college prep classes, including Chinese, Japanese, French, and Spanish as foreign language options.
It is wonderful that PANE is still known and loved at Snowden despite our eight-year hiatus. Mark Dykes, who was a Grad Student Intern there back in the day, is now the Vice Principal. Our old friend, Larry Green, of the Snowden Guidance Office and a Boston community and church leader, is our point of contact at the school, along with guidance intern and former Princeton Mentoring Program star, Yusuef Mohammed, Snowden ’09, Denison ’13, Cambridge College ’23.
The Princeton-Snowden Mentoring Program has been slowly coming back to life this fall. Ms. Raquel Martinez, the head of the school, expressed her support for our program—and the clear benefit of mentoring for Snowden students. We are in search of a interested Princeton alumni and friends to become mentors too during the next school year. Training and coaching will be provided. We’re in search of mentors who are good listeners and patient relationship builders who enjoy interacting with young people.
Here are some of the future directions that are currently on the table:
- a ninth grade team that would include one after school meeting (2:30-3:30 pm) per month--as an anchor and bonding opportunity from which various one-on-one mentor/student collaborations could develop
- one-on-one mentoring-- in person or remote--facilitated by the guidance office with support from our program in which mentors would be matched one-on-one with a student who could particularly benefit from a certain mentor's career, academic, or other shared interest, based on an application, attached here
- a steering committee of interested Snowden alumni and Princeton alumni who would meet together on Zoom to identify useful and actionable ways to support Snowden students and build up the alumni community
- joint social networking and career mentoring opportunities for Snowden alumni and Princeton alumni together
- providing opportunities that make the students feel “lucky.” Do you have access to useful freebies—reusable water bottles since the school often runs out of bubbler cups? Or access to field trips, cultural opportunities and career advising—including job shadowing and other intern type experiences?
- sharing international knowledge, fundraising know-how, travel savvy. Snowden International has had a long track record of arranging student-faculty group tours abroad during school holidays as a mind broadening, life changing, empowering cultural experience for Snowden students. We will have the chance to be a part of bringing this tradition back after its COVID hiatus.
If you have questions, are interested in participating, or would like to be put on the e-mail list to hear updates on how the
PANE re-entry to Snowden Mentoring is unfolding, please reply to Mary Koger ’86, mkskoger@alumni.princeton.edu