During the Faculty Day last Friday, multi-award winning professor and author Dr Queena Lee Chua spoke to the faculty concerning the growing students at risk in the university. From her experience in 2015, she encountered 60 cases of “at risk” cases: depression, Aspergers, suicidal tendencies, etc. It was a riveting talk, and an eye opener to us academicians of the role of the professor in such cases: the teachers are the front liners to our students. While we are academicians, we are also human capable of empathizing to the needs of our students.
At a certain point, I thought of myself in the proceedings, not as a teacher, but as someone who struggled internal depression. My struggle was cultivated by several factors: pressure from studies, family problems, discriminating blockmates, false identities, economic poverty. What I appear on the outside is entirely different on the struggles that I had to deal within me.
In college, when I was undergoing through all of these, I wanted to talk to someone. I just wanted someone to listen to my needs. I recalled that the first people I have confided with my feelings and struggles were not my friends, but my professors.
My choice in talking to my professors was a good one. My concerns were too much for a college student to bear, and I realized that I needed insight and guidance from the older people. Besides, why should I trust an advice from a person my age? Their concerns might just be similar as mine and I am not sure that going for “the blind leading the blind” would make a good option for me.
During the lowest points in my life, it was the professors who became my personal saviors. Most of my blockmates and friends knew I was angry, hot tempered, and irritable most of the time (which resulted to being avoided and excluded in social gatherings). Little did they know my family was struggling to make ends meet, and we were already at the brink of losing everything, including our house and business.
I turned to talking to professors about my situation. I talked and poured out and became open to them. I said this is too much for me to bear. I ranted how life was unfair, and cruel, and unkind. I lashed out how God wanted the young people to suffer (thus my perennial crisis of faith throughout college). I cried because of sheer helplessness, despite the desire to help and assist my family.
It was in those days that I got to know the humanity that resides within our professors. They have set aside their lessons to listen to me. I saw how they would drop everything just to focus on their students. They were excellent in the classroom, they are more brilliant when listening to the needs of their students.
And I believe that it is in these situations that these professors suddenly become your mentors. A mentor is one who will guide you beyond the confines of the academic work, but will become the light that guides your way. A mentor cultivates a relationship based on mutual understanding and trust which builds and grows over time. To grow a mentor relationship is one that comes naturally and cannot be forced by any existing organization or society.
Moreover, your mentor is someone who will struggle with you, not above you. It is the process of discovery and exploration. To be a mentor is to posess a privileged position with the power to cast the mentee to any direction he or she pleases. But understand that a mentor, for all of his power, has also the capacity to be a moral compass and a spiritual adviser.
Now that I am working in the academe, I clearly could not have done it without my mentors. I have different mentors for different needs, each responding to a portion of my concerns. Our role as teachers extend beyond the confines of the classroom, in the hopes that we may be able to save a person in distress, or abate the worst possible scenario. In any case, it all begins with listening.
