‘Career Beginnings’ Helps Young People Plan Ahead

You’re about to carry the banner as the only member of your family ever to go to college. You’re proud of that, and you’re eager to get your academic career off the ground.

But it isn’t that easy when your parents and most of your family live on the other side of the world and you’re still coming to grips with the intricacies of the local culture and language. And the time has come to start zeroing in on what you want to do with the rest of your life. What you want more than anything is a little straight talk and good advice, and maybe a friend with a connection or two.

Fortunately for Hieu Vo, Scott Donnelly is only a short walk away.

“The first day, when he called me on the phone, I just said, ‘Who’s he?’ ” said Vo, 19, smiling and making a mock quizzical face. “But we got to be really good friends. I got to be able to talk to him about other things than the program--like a friend.”

“The program”--the organization that is helping Vo and dozens of other high school students from disadvantaged families in Orange County--is called Career Beginnings, and its title is the most succinct description of its purpose.

Begun at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, and in its seventh year in Orange County, Career Beginnings is designed to pair high school juniors--generally students who are immigrants or who have learned English as a second language--with adult professional mentors who help the students plan their educational and professional futures. Between 50 and 60 such pairings are made here each year, Donnelly said.

The Donnelly-Vo teaming was typical of the program. Slightly more than a year ago, a representative from Career Beginnings, which has its Orange County headquarters at Rancho Santiago College, outlined the program to one of Vo’s classes at Valley High School. Vo later submitted an application and last summer was accepted and began attending a series of the once-a-week workshops held throughout the summer to help the students become acquainted with, among other things, the paperwork and logistics of entering college.

“They talked about the classes you need to take and about financial aid--things like that,” Vo said. “It really helped.”

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Things began to get more personal last fall. Vo had indicated an interest in studying accounting and was paired with Donnelly, who is a CPA and a member of the Career Beginnings board of directors.

That began a year of regular meetings between the two, mostly to discuss career and educational options and plans, but occasionally just to visit and talk, sometimes over pizza. The meetings were made more convenient by the fact that Vo--who makes his home with his sister and brother-in-law and their two children--lives only a few blocks from Donnelly’s Santa Ana home, where he sometimes drops in for a quick hello.

As a result of the geographic proximity, Donnelly and Vo may actually be closer than some of the Career Beginnings pairs, since the organization’s guidelines for mentors specifies that mentors should “take a genuine interest in the day-to-day life of your student--without intruding or becoming a ‘parent substitute.’ ” The relationship is intended to be mostly an academic and professional one. According to the organization’s guidelines, “A mentor should strive to help a student in ways that fulfill the goals a parent has for their child: success and strength of character.”

Parental direction has been strong in Vo’s life, but it came from a distance. Born and raised in Vietnam, he came to California in 1988 after spending six months in the Philippines having papers processed and preparing to enter the United States. However, he left most of his family--his mother, father, three sisters and a brother--behind in Vietnam.

At his mother’s insistence, he said, he, as the youngest child, would come to America, take advantage of the more abundant educational opportunities here, and become the first college-educated member of the Vo family. He plans to enter Cal State Fullerton in the fall as a business major.

“We don’t look for the 4.0s, or the 2.0s either,” Donnelly said . “Mostly we have average kids who probably have been in ESL (English as a second language) classes and basically who are getting by. Quite a few students don’t have college-educated family members.”

A mentoring program for such students may offer an ideal boost to both ego and ambition, said Carol Stanley, who is the coordinator of a similar student-to-student mentor program at UCI.

“What we see here, primarily, is that students are able to link up with someone and the feeling of alienation or newness or lack of a friend begins to disappear,” she said. “It helps them become socialized in what could be a potentially very discouraging situation. My feeling is that any type of positive mentoring is beneficial, whether it’s for younger people or older people or people who don’t speak the language well. It’s absolutely valuable on a personal level. It involves personal growth and helps these young students grow and mature in a way they otherwise wouldn’t have an opportunity to do.”

The numbers indicate that Career Beginnings makes a difference. More than 500 students have completed the program in Orange County, with nearly 90% of them going on to come form of higher education.

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For Thu Chau, an 18-year-old graduate of Valley High School and a student in the Career Beginnings program, Kara Bluntach is a kind of sounding board.

“We don’t do things for the students,” said Bluntach, a court reporter from Yorba Linda. “As a mentor you’re more like a friend who tries to be objective.”

At first, said Bluntach, Chau--always a good student in computer and math classes--expressed an interest in studying architecture. So Bluntach arranged for a tour of an Orange County architecture firm with one of the other mentors who worked there. Eventually, however, Chau’s imagination turned to accounting, and Bluntach nurtured that idea. Now Chau plans to attend Orange Coast College for two years, then hopes to move on to one of the University of California schools to earn an accounting degree.

Chau, the eldest of six children, fled Vietnam by boat with part of her family five years ago. She spent six months in a refugee camp in the Philippines before the family flew to California, eventually renting a house in Santa Ana. Her father, a farmer, was finally able to leave Vietnam and joined the family last fall. Chau, like Vo, plans to be a standard-bearer.

“I’ll be the first one in my family to go to college,” Chau said. “But everything was new to me, and I needed help. It’s been great finding out about different kinds of careers.”

As for Bluntach, she has found a new young friend and a new source of satisfaction.

“A lot of what we do is social,” she said. “Just getting to know each other was important, particularly since we come from different cultures. We’d go to the movies, to Disneyland, Bowers Museum, meet at restaurants. We explored the campus at OCC one weekend.”

And, she said, she set aside a day for Chau to “shadow” her at work--not necessarily to learn about court reporting, but to see firsthand how a business office operates and how workers relate to one another.

“I think we’ve developed a friendship,” Bluntach said. “Not like a parent, but like an older sister. It’s been a wonderful experience for me. It’s exciting to know you’ve had something to do with someone else’s success. She’s just blossomed. I’ve really seen her grow.”

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The Career Beginnings program itself, though, is suffering. Recently, slightly more than $200,000 in state funds, which covered the staff and administrative costs of the program, were cut from the Rancho Santiago College budget. However, the women’s Soroptimist International organization has begun a matching-funds program to help make up the shortfall. Through the plan, Soroptimist will match donations up to $20,000 that businesses make to Career Beginnings. Career Beginnings is also offering various underwriting opportunities for businesses, among them an “adopt-a-student” program in which businesses would provide financial support to specific student-mentor teams.

The program will continue, said Jim Hughes, acting president of Career Beginnings’ board of directors, but funds will come exclusively from “community initiative” schemes similar to those of the Soroptimists.

Such support, Donnelly said, can pay businesses dividends in the long term, and not just in a general sense. Sometimes, he said, student-mentor relationships continue for years.

“I have associates who are dealing quite a bit with former students,” he said. “Some of the students are employed by their former mentors.

“I’ve benefited from the mentoring too. It brings you back to a kind of innocent time in your life. I’ve learned a lot about Hieu’s family traditions and culture, and I look forward to watching him grow. And he knows he can always call me.”