Be a short-term mentor for university students from Latin America!!
Every summer in July and every winter in January, a non-profit called ITD (Institute for Training and Development, Inc.) manages and runs a Study of the U.S. Institutes Program (SUSI), a prestigious program that is sponsored by the U.S. Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. State Department. The program entails five weeks of intensive academic study in U.S. Policymaking, Entrepreneurship, Economic Empowerment, Leadership, and Politics. The highly competitive scholarship is awarded to twenty undergraduate students each time, all young leaders from Mexico and Central and South American countries. In the summers, the students who come to ITD are from Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala; In the winters, they are from Chile, Uruguay, Argentina, and Brazil. The students live in Amherst for three and half of the five weeks of their program, and attend specialized lectures at Amherst College and at ITD.
Aside from being an academic scholarship, the program aims to introduce the awardees to U.S. culture through family home stays, weekend cultural trips, and, here’s where you come in… university-aged mentors! As a mentor, you have the opportunity to meet and form relationships with the students. You will experience a range of activities, mostly informal in nature, that allow for rich cultural exchange. In the summers, there is a requirement that mentors speak Spanish, as the students do not have to speak English to be selected for the program. This is a great opportunity to improve your Spanish (or Portuguese)! In the winters, there is no Spanish requirement as the students are required to speak English to be selected (with English being a common language between Brazil and the fore-mentioned Hispanic countries).
My experiences as a mentor for the SUSI program for the past two summers have been extremely meaningful and I have met people who I stay in contact with to this day. I feel lucky that this program exists right here in Amherst and that I’ve been able to be a part of it. I can’t say enough good things about this program, the students, and all the staff at ITD who run it.
The commitment is 30 hours over the course of three weeks, and most of those hours will be spent hanging out with the students at their house in Amherst, showing them around town, and helping with/attending certain activities like the cultural night.
If you are interested in applying to be a mentor this coming January, you can find the link here! And feel free to reach out to me at lclemente @ umass.edu with any questions—I’d love to talk to you about it. I love this program and I’m excited for others to have the same opportunity that I did.