Name: Sophie Richardson
Current occupation: QMSU President
ReachOut! history: Mentor, Cayley Primary School, 2007/08
Current occupation: QMSU President
ReachOut! history: Mentor, Cayley Primary School, 2007/08
“I found out about ReachOut! in my second year at Queen Mary through Provide Volunteering. I thought it sounded like a really great way to give something back to the local community and I had experience of working in schools and with young people that I wanted to build upon. I was placed in a primary school on Ocean Estate in Tower Hamlets and was a mentor for some of the girls in year 6. The other mentors in the team were volunteers from QM too and so it was a great way to meet other students.
We ran a two hour session once a week, the first hour being sports focussed (the girls we worked with were so competitive!) and the second hour being one-to-one mentoring. My mentee was a keen writer so we focussed on her literacy skills and later, on her numeracy skills. It was a great feeling knowing that I was able to help a young person develop and grow personally over the course of the year, particularly on the run-up to leaving her beloved primary school and moving on to the big world of secondary school!
I thoroughly enjoyed my time as a ReachOut! mentor and was quite sad to say bye to the girls I’d worked with at the end of the year. The experience will stay with me forever I’m sure and the opportunity to complete my OCN Mentoring qualification with ReachOut! was fantastic. The skills I learnt served me well on my Erasmus Year Abroad (a compulsory part of my French and Linguistics degree) as I ended up teaching 10 year olds in France.
One of the reasons I think students are so great as ReachOut! volunteers is because we are young and able to connect well with the pupils. More importantly though, I found that as a ReachOut! volunteer I was the first person the young people met who had been to university. Some of them hadn’t realised there was a university right across the road, let alone know someone who had been! So to be broadening their horizons and introducing them to the prospect of higher education was something I felt really quite proud of.”
We ran a two hour session once a week, the first hour being sports focussed (the girls we worked with were so competitive!) and the second hour being one-to-one mentoring. My mentee was a keen writer so we focussed on her literacy skills and later, on her numeracy skills. It was a great feeling knowing that I was able to help a young person develop and grow personally over the course of the year, particularly on the run-up to leaving her beloved primary school and moving on to the big world of secondary school!
I thoroughly enjoyed my time as a ReachOut! mentor and was quite sad to say bye to the girls I’d worked with at the end of the year. The experience will stay with me forever I’m sure and the opportunity to complete my OCN Mentoring qualification with ReachOut! was fantastic. The skills I learnt served me well on my Erasmus Year Abroad (a compulsory part of my French and Linguistics degree) as I ended up teaching 10 year olds in France.
One of the reasons I think students are so great as ReachOut! volunteers is because we are young and able to connect well with the pupils. More importantly though, I found that as a ReachOut! volunteer I was the first person the young people met who had been to university. Some of them hadn’t realised there was a university right across the road, let alone know someone who had been! So to be broadening their horizons and introducing them to the prospect of higher education was something I felt really quite proud of.”
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