Aiglon’s Mentoring Programme - Bridging Alumni with Current Students

Inspiring future generations and creating an enduring community.

Our Aiglon alumni are deeply valued, integral members of the Aiglon community. The School strives to maintain close lifelong ties with its alumni and to ensure relationships between alumni are also nurtured. Likewise alumni attachment is enduring with many reminiscing about their time at Aiglon and frequently returning to campus. 

A key way of further nourishing those links is through Aiglon’s ongoing mentoring programme. By leveraging the power of our alumni network and by connecting current students with alumni, real-life perspectives and wisdom beyond the classroom and outside academia can be shared, our students are inspired and our community-feel continues to expand.

We have diverse examples of how our programme benefits both our students and alumni reciprocally: 

• When one student’s internship unexpectedly fell through in Barcelona, she was able to land an alternative last minute marketing internship there thanks to the generosity of an alumnus who we located on our exclusive alumni networking platform Aiglon Life, reached out to and put our student in touch with.

• Another student came out very motivated following an hour’s virtual coaching session on the art world arranged via the strength of our network.  

• A summer shadowing opportunity in Germany was provided to one of our senior students and allowed him to gain crucial insights into an industry of potential interest.

• To keep busy during the summer break, one student orchestrated her own research project on entrepreneurship, and Aiglon’s alumni relations team were able to remotely connect her with alumni entrepreneurs around the world to interview and carry out her research. 

• Recent Aiglon graduates are grateful to unite with fellow alumni over coffee for career guidance from the West Coast to the East. 

• Aiglon aims to spotlight influential alumni and stimulate current students inviting alumni to campus to speak at major school assemblies on themes associated with our Guiding Principles.

• The School secures thought-provoking masterclasses through its alumni and there are a number of new exciting creative projects in the pipeline.

• We also hope to arrange for our former scholars to mentor our current scholars. 

A recent mentoring highlight was our Panel for Year 12 and 13s and their parents on the first day of term, August 28th - an initiative from our University Advising team led by our Director of University Advising, Patience Fanella Koch. We welcomed eleven panelists including two alumni staff, with a keynote speaker focusing on Artificial Intelligence, and panelists covering a rich variety of fields, from communications, film, photography, hospitality, finance, to fine art, engineering and psychology.  

Following the panel our students had the chance to directly interact with our alumni and ask many questions. Vital takeaways for all from the day include the notions of seeking mentors; being persistent; seizing opportunities; getting out of our comfort zone; keeping perspective and positivity and staying humble; staying curious by exploring passions and values and falling in love with the problems rather than the solutions. 

Quotes from impressive figures from past and present were featured during the panel, from Winston Churchill’s “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts” to Sheryl Sandberg’s painful truth that “It is the hard days - the times that challenge you to the very core - that will determine who you are.” 

While one of our panelists, text artist Massimo Agostinelli (Belvedere, 2006) aptly summarised that our lives are composed of L.earning I.mplementation F.ulfilment E.njoyment and that it is a perpetual juggling act.

To summarise, some of us may never really know what we would like to be, despite facing challenges and already ‘growing up’, but our current students can at least realise that there is no one solution meant for them, that success (and failure) comes from the interplay of character and serendipity, that there are elements that can and cannot be controlled, yet, essentially, if they work hard to develop as resilient individuals, and that Aiglon helps provide them with the vehicles to hone their skills and the network to cultivate, then they will enter the world ready to chart their own (possibly meandering) path.