At Yleana, we don’t just stop when the summer is over. For our students who need additional college planning and application assistance, we offer a mentorship program.

Our mentors are Yleana alumni and staff who want to pay their Yleana experience forward, as well as volunteers from the community. Mentors help our students with the application process, advise on choosing colleges to apply to, assist with financial aid, and help find scholarships. They help students with their personal statement and can give advice on what being in college is actually like. Our mentors help our students:

• fill out the Common App

• write the college essay

• create lists of targets/reaches/safeties, using Naviance/scattergrams as available, and evaluate financial utility of the schools to which they’re applying

  • net price calculator

  • schools that meet 100% of need

  • no-loan schools

  • profiles of similar students with similar financial situations at those schools

• maintain/manage Common App deadlines

• get teacher recommendations

• Research scholarships - both regional (little potatoes with high likelihood of winning) and national (big $$ but much harder to get)

• help parents with financial aid forms like

  • FAFSA

  • CSS profile

  • other scholarship and financial aid-related forms

Mentoring begins in the fall, once students have started their senior year of college. It continues through the new year, when students typically submit their college applications, and concludes once students have decided the school they will be attending the next year. Our mentors, especially our Yleana alums who are now in college, report how much they appreciate the ability to pay their Yleana experience forward to another student. We are lucky that some mentors come back year after year to work with each new crop of students.

The mentorship program at Yleana is a way to improve college access for first-generation college goers like our students. It helps close the opportunity gap by removing the practical and operational barriers of applying to college. Our mentors remain with the students throughout the process and are their biggest cheerleader and adviser. Once Yleana students have the SAT® scores they need, we want to make sure nothing else gets in the way of their success.