Mentorship: Moving in the direction of connection

When I applied to law school, I had only ever met one lawyer. I knew almost nothing about the profession I was joining. I navigated my first few weeks of law school in a daze, overwhelmed by the horror stories of long hours, scary managing partners, and an absence of any semblance of a life outside of work.

Luckily, I was not alone in my inexperience with the profession. I think about 80% of my UCalgary Law class were first-generation lawyers. According to the Faculty of Law viewbook, the 2024–25 1L class is 89% first-generation lawyers.

Because the Alberta bar recognizes that so many of us come into this profession without significant networks, it has granted access to many mentorship programs. As a keen law student, I jumped right into one of the programs, hoping a mentor connection might help ease some of the fears that had been building.

Unfortunately, my first meeting with my mentor fell below my expectations. I felt a complete lack of connection to my mentor. We chatted a little bit about her pathway into the legal profession, the types of activities she did in law school, and how she quickly found the practice area she liked. While I enjoyed her as a person, I found that the conversation lacked depth. It was no different than the various panels I’d attended in the first few weeks of law school, where practitioners talk about their experiences in the profession. I wanted more out of the mentoring relationship.

The next couple of meetings with this mentor felt similarly flat. Soon after, I quietly stopped reaching out to schedule meetings, and my mentor did not follow up with me.

Throughout law school, I made a few further attempts at building mentoring relationships with lawyers in the field. And while some of them got a bit further along than my first one, I still felt I was lacking the deeper relationships with my mentors that I sought. Conversations always felt stilted and surface-level. I wanted to get into discussions about the intricacies of the profession. I wanted the details about managing life in the legal field, all the minutiae that come with it.

During this time, I made an off-hand comment to a psychologist about struggling as a mentee. That little comment led to a larger discussion about why I felt so dissatisfied with how the mentoring was going. And I came out of that discussion with a striking conclusion: I had been a terrible mentee.

Despite my keenness in the early days, I hadn’t been putting in the effort that a good mentor–mentee relationship requires. To gain the full benefit of mentorship, ongoing work in the form of thoughtfulness, reflection, brainstorming, and engaging is necessary.

Following this realization, I reviewed articles about how to be a good mentee, several of which are provided at the end of this article. I wrote down some of the suggested strategies and reviewed them ahead of meeting with my mentors. I put the strategies into action and noticed improvements in my mentor–mentee relationships right away.

While I am no expert on mentorship, some of the techniques that I implemented were as follows:

• Identify goals – both your own individual goals and your goals for the mentorship relationship. It may be helpful to create an action plan.
• Make agendas for meetings and make note of any topics that were missed or that warrant further discussion.
• Keep a journal or notes page available if an idea or question hits.
• Have an openness to discuss various topics – including possibly constructive feedback from the mentor.
• Discuss the relationship itself with your mentor – if a goal or objective is not being met, address it head on.

A key connective thread to each of these techniques is intentionality. It is important to know what you want to get out of the mentor relationship. The reason may change over time, and with it, the relationship will evolve. When I was a first-year law student, my reason for wanting a mentor was getting a better picture of what it meant to be a person working in the legal field. I wanted to see what life looked like for someone taking on this mighty role of a lawyer. But as I learned and grew, that reason became less important, and others took its place, such as getting perspectives on the transition from articling into practice or how to manage a growing file load and changing performance expectations.

While mentors have their own role in advancing the mentor–mentee relationship, I encourage other mentees to embrace the leadership role of guiding the direction of meetings and discussions. Not only is it an opportunity to maximize the impact that the mentorship has on your career and life, but it is also a chance to build the skills of planning, reflection, and intentionality – these are soft skills that can have a benefit far beyond just the interactions of mentor and mentee.