An interview with Victoria Menzies, Griffith Honours College

Mentor, coach and grow. And never stop growing.

 

I spoke with Victoria Menzies, who manages Griffith Honours College, about her passion for mentoring, coaching and all things learning. Many of you know Victoria, as she has been involved for years in areas such as PASS and peer mentoring at QUT, and she led the start of the first P2P SIG for STARS (which became P4P and is now ‘Peer Programs Network’).  She additionally holds an HEA Senior Fellowship and has been highly involved in sharing with others through conferences as well as through being involved in more informal connections.

Victoria exuded enthusiasm for what she does, relating how she can see that the personal development and confidence gained through students’ university experience has placed them in a space where they can more positively impact others, be it individuals, communities or beyond. Victoria explained that Griffith Honours College is based on a North American college model which focuses on fostering peer-to-peer connections and creating opportunities for high achieving students to take on challenges they never could have imagined. In other words, it provides high achievers with ‘high’ challenges to help them reach their full potential. ‘Full potential’ is likely the wrong phrase, as that sounds like there is an end, a limit, and Victoria would absolutely argue that there is not. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that the Honours College experience is a time of acceleration on the students’ learning, growing and discovering journey, which is a journey without an end.

This current role puts Victoria in a position to fully practise the culmination of all her previous learnings in how to create access and opportunities for students to enhance themselves, whether it’s through working with mentors or coaches or through being a mentor or coach. It makes it possible for someone who has no (or little) belief in themselves to see what they can be. As a phenomenal foundation for creativity that enables future leaders by shaping their values to make a difference, it is truly transformative. Leadership is a key skill that the Honours program aims to develop in students, and as I listened to Victoria, I could see she was truly a leadership aficionado—not tossing the term around carelessly (in fact, hardly using the term at all) but explaining how the program provides opportunities for students to learn about themselves—to revel in being themselves and to learn about what success is for them—as this is what makes true leaders (my words, not Victoria’s). To do this, she gives the Honours students global experiences that foster personal development and the students gain an understanding that it is about being themselves. Just one example of these global experiences is when Victoria recently took a group of Honour students to Vietnam to work on a Hopebox project that the students co-created and implemented. (Hopebox runs a food delivery service and café to help Vietnamese women escape domestic violence. For details see https://www.hopeboxvn.com/ ) The project was to create videos and to design bags to be manufactured in Vietnam and sold in Australia to publicise Hopebox.

A specific area of interest for Victoria is reward. She pointed out that we all know that the main impact of peer programs is on the leaders, and she is interested in what they see as the reward for this. What she has found is that payment has limited reward providing short-term gain. Sustained and significant reward is about the connections that mentoring opens up. It’s about reaching people further along the line. It’s about the ability for student leaders as emerging professionals to make meaningful connections with professionals (academic, alumni, just graduated). When students graduate, they need referees. This is a significant challenge. Through student leader roles, students have an opportunity to build up professional relationships that helped them to understand more clearly what their goals, aspirations and values are, and how to talk about that in terms of the future. They can build up an understanding of how their values and aspirations align with their desired occupation, and they also learn how to relate areas of not-initially-obvious relevance. Students can easily say “I did x.  I did y.” but often can’t see the alignment. This is reward!

A final point I would like to include from the wealth of enthusiasm and experience that Victoria shared with me is her recommendation for a book. The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Make Dumb Mistakes was written by David Robson, a London-based science journalist. Victoria feels that this book is highly relevant to all of us not only professionally but for ‘life’. The key point for her in relation to enabling students to maximise their personal development was that this book brought home so clearly that people who may appear (or are) more intelligent than you do not necessarily have the best answers. It is not about ‘oohing and aahing’ the team leader because they are intellectually superior. Everyone comes from a different place, and the value of a team is to share the different experiences and perspectives—it is not about succumbing to one person’s idea just because they may be in a higher position or because they appear more intelligent. Of course, as I listened, the three words that swam around my brain (without distracting my listening!) were ‘community of practice’.

I would like to thank Victoria for sharing this part of her story with us. I am sure many of you know other parts of her extensive narrative, and I know that I will have the opportunity to hear more in the not-too-distant future. Thank you, Victoria!

Interview by Lynn Milburn, Coordinator, Peer Support Programs, Deakin University