Mentoring as a leveraged strategy to close the network gap in the life sciences industry

Access to social capital has an immense impact on socio-economic mobility and career attainment. All too often, students from underserved and marginalized communities struggle to find and mobilize social capital. This inequitable access to professional career networks is known as the network gap. Students in affluent communities are tapped into networks with enormous social capital. For others, unless there is an external intervention, access to those networks is limited. My Ed.L.D. residency focused on addressing the network gap. One promising solution is corporate volunteer mentorship. While many of these models exist across the landscape, few look at mentorship through a social capital construct. Even rarer are cases of corporations linking youth mentoring activities to closing the network gap. My residency site was Life Science Cares, a corporate social responsibility nonprofit that leverages the intellectual, financial, and human capital of the life sciences industry to tackle poverty. The life sciences industry is one of the fastest growing and most economically powerful mission-driven sectors in the world. Through Life Science Cares, I launched a program called One-to-One that connects life science industry volunteers with underserved college students for one-on-one networking and career exploration. Ultimately, my work uncovered a low-lift, high-impact model that enables the life sciences industry to work towards purposefully closing the network gap. This model’s feasibility relies on a combination of both low-code and custom technology to drive student and volunteer engagement. My findings also serve as a proof-of-concept for other industry sectors to build upon as they deepen their commitment and impact in the fields of education and workforce development.