Mentorship
Academic skills are very important and can be gained from college but probably not for life skills. Kwah Dao provides intensive one-on-one mentoring to both potential scholarship students and to students who are already receiving scholarships. Mentorship is provided by two of our graduates, Ek (who graduated in Law and is now a licensed lawyer) and Nuan (who graduated in Business Chinese) who have been through a series of tough life events from their childhood to adulthood. Mentorship includes helping students develop effective studying skills, understanding how the college application process works, and leadership training. We also provide assistance with the day-to-day basics, like understanding how to budget, manage personal finances, and how to navigate bureaucratic systems.
We realize that mentorship is very important to our scholarship students especially those who are stateless and nationality-less students attending higher education as they are at a turning point in their lives. . Many of them might have had some experience dealing with troubles in their daily lives during their childhood and adolescence but not as hard as the new world, college student life. Finding new supportive friends, understanding other cultures, thoughts, and beliefs, facing discrimination, struggling with studies or financial problems, worrying about future uncertainty for being in a complex civil registration status, and so on. All these problems might affect their concentration and study performance or even make them drop out in the worst case. This is why providing experienced mentors to help these students out of stressful situations and keep moving forward to their goals is necessary.