What do you think when you are doing a mentorship for a person who has more experience and qualifications than you? What if you know that she is also a leader in a big company like Unilever? At first, you think that it’s impossible or useless and that what I thought for the first time.

The story began when I saw a post from my friend talking about a reverse mentorship program called “Embark”, and he recommended it for who is living in Istanbul, Turkey to join it.
I applied for because, I saw it as a new challenge where I can take an action to show that Syrian people have the qualifications that can contribute to Turkey and Turkish community, show a good image about Syrian people, get a new experience, and build new networks with successful people and leaders in their community.

I chose to be one of the mentors 🙂

It was supposed to organize an introductory meeting where all of the mentees and mentors can meet, but since the Coronavirus pandemic, it got canceled, it was disappointment for me because I need to build more networks, know more people, and I prefer to meet people face to face, but I had to focus on the program to make the most valuable experience for me and for the mentee.
Then, the program team introduced me to the mentee via email, and we arranged the first session online. For my luck, she was a Director at Unilever”; she is a very experienced person and she has great achievements.

When I knew my mentee and her background, I was thinking of what I should prepare to give her the maximum valuable experience that can help her in her career, so I started thinking about the commonalities between me and her and thought about my Master’s thesis on Business Research. At the first meeting with her, I was nervous, but she was very friendly, so after a few minutes I felt comfortable and we started getting to know each other more, what our goals are, and what we will talk about in the four sessions that we’ll have. During the four sessions that we had, each session was about 30 to 60 mins, we discussed different topics: culture, living abroad, build networks, planning, and many other topics,

We finished the program with great outcomes, build new networks, become a friend with my mentee and I learned a lot from her, it was a great journey and I have to thank her for everything that she did, which made the journey very successful.