◊ Be a Mentor

As you no doubt remember from your days at CSUN, balancing school, work, family and research is a tremendous challenge. LA ROCS students are in the midst of this rewarding and difficult time and they could benefit from your support. As graduates of the CSUN Geology Department and former members of the LA ROCS program, you are the success story that our CSUN students aspire towards! Now that you’ve transitioned from CSUN to industry, graduate school, or academia, we want to invite you back to CSUN to share your experiences and knowledge with current LA ROCS students that are working towards their degrees at CSUN.

As an LA ROCS Mentor, we encourage you to work with a current CSUN student and discuss their experiences and challenges as a geoscience student. Strike up a conversation and ask them: What do you find rewarding about being a student at CSUN? What are your challenges? What excites you about geology? What would you like to do when you graduate? These conversations help build rapport with CSUN students and help you get to know the challenges that they may be dealing with.

We encourage you to meet regularly with LA ROCS students via Zoom, Skype, or over the phone. Regular communication is helpful for figuring out problems and for brainstorming about ideas and solutions. If you find that you are having a problem connecting or you’d like assistance with mentoring, please feel free to reach out to Dr. Schwartz or any of the Roc Docs. We’d be happy to help.

Finally, as an LA ROCS Mentor, we want to invite you back to CSUN to participate in our ROC Talks so that you can also benefit from ongoing professional development. These topics are aimed at developing skills that LA ROCS students can use in the workplace and they may be helpful to you too! If you’re ready to be an LA ROCStar Mentor, please complete the mentor application form by clicking the button to the right.