-: 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.