Last Official Mentee Meeting (or Planning For 2016)

This past week was the final mentee only meeting for my Women In Film mentoring group. We’ve been meeting for about a year now, and we only have one meeting left with our mentors.

It’s been a pretty awesome year with my mentoring group. I’ve become friends with all the women in my mentoring circle. I’ve hung out socially with them outside of our meetings and we’ve discussed working on a project together in the future (the benefit of having women in all parts of the industry in the mentoring group). And I’m sad that our year is coming to an end.

Our last mentoring group was pretty small. Due to holiday conflicts, only 3 of us were there (out of 8), but we still had a nice time. It was more of a social hangout than an official meeting, but that was fine with us all. We chatted about things we have been doing in the past few months and what we are working on in the start of the new year. We also did a gift exchange (I got some greeting cards with amazing artwork on the front done by one of my fellow mentee’s husband).

With the end of the official mentoring circle time here, we also discussed what we wanted to do going forward. In my past mentoring group, it seemed like the end of our official time was a natural end to our group. We had never met outside of the meetings with our mentors, and while I do keep in touch with some of them over Facebook we’ve never gotten together after the end of our group.

But with my current group, we’ve gotten to know each other so well and have really bonded as a group. So we started talking about keeping our current schedule of meeting every other month as just a group of mentees. It’s going to continue to be an accountability group as well as a sounding board for questions or issues we might be dealing with in our professional or personal lives.

We’ve already started to plan how to continue our meetings into the new year. I think that we will be meeting again in February and I have to say that I’m so happy that it seems like the rest of my group is also looking forward to continuing with our meetings. I’d be pretty upset if we stopped meeting. Our meetings have become evenings that I look forward to. It’s an evening with my friends and an evening that always leaves me feeling inspired. I still feel like I’m the most beginner of our group, but if anyone else feels that way about me they don’t show it. They treat me with so much respect and have really helped to push me further in my career.

I’m so lucky that Women in Film partnered me up with the mentoring group that I have. I know how tough it can be to create a bond within the group when all the women are extremely busy and have crazy and complicated schedules. But we all tried to make our meetings a priority and it really worked. I have the opportunity to join a new mentoring group in the spring or fall next year, and I’m not sure if I will do that. I would love to have another great group, but I’m also scared that the new group wouldn’t be able to live up to this group and I wouldn’t be able to be as involved as I would want to be. I’ve got time before mentoring circle applications come around again, so I don’t have to rush to a decision yet.

But for now, I’m so grateful for what I’ve gotten out of the past year and I can’t wait to see what the next year with my mentoring group will bring to me.

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