Cody is the Associate Director of Programming of College Mentors for Kids, a national nonprofit whose mission is to “connect college students with the most to give to kids who need it most.” When Cody isn’t in the office developing programs and checking on participants satisfaction, he is on the road visiting all of the college campuses that have mentor programs. He will spend the day observing the interactions between mentors and kids and then have a breakdown and evaluation session with the mentors to ensure all participants are getting the most out of the program.
Transcript
My name is Cody Lopez and I am the Associate Director of Programing for College Mentors for Kids. For me, a regular day to day, it's a lot of working with college students. So our program manifests as a student organization at a bunch of different universities across the country. And so I do oversight for those chapters of the organization. So, we have student leaders at each university. And so I'm working really closely with them, pretty much in constant communication, making sure that they've got all the tools they need for their chapters to succeed, as well as, kind of setting some guidelines and standards and just guiding them through those things. It's very much a partnership between myself and college students. But I have the chance to talk with them and you know, figure out their strengths and help them develop what they want to do and then also take their chapter in a really good direction. And then recently, it's been travel season so, I get to travel to each of the universities that I oversee once per semester. Just got back from NC State and UVA yesterday actually. When I get to a campus, so I usually try to stay for a day, maybe a day and a half so I can fit in time for everyone. But I'll go and prior to that, I'll schedule times to meet with their university advisor, schedule times to meet with their elementary school partners and schedule times to meet with all of the college student leadership kind of, individually. So I'll go through all of those things and it's a lot of check in, you know, how are things going, how can we improve them, where the strengths and the weaknesses, are there any changes that are gonna take place that you know of in the near future that might affect us? And then ultimately I get to observe an activity with the kids. So, all of our programming, we're bringing elementary school students to a college campus once a week and those kids are paired one on one with college student mentors. So every single week, it's the same kids, same mentors but the leadership are planning new, hands-on experiential learning opportunities so, they may be making slime in the chem lab or they may be selling lemonade on campus or practicing with the football team and talking about teamwork and inclusion. Any number of things so I get to, outside of all those meetings, I break that day off and set aside that time and I just go watch and see how it goes. I'll ride the bus with the kids and I'll eat snack and I'll hang out and I'll just watch the relationships develop and make some notes on you know, you can tighten up the screws here on this thing or this went really really well. And then, after that's over, the kids go home and we usually kind of have a Pow Wow breakdown, how everything went and what could go better.
Download transcript
