What is mentorship? There are about 743,000,000 results on Google alone trying to answer the question. Team Torace put our search skills to the test and compiled what the internet thinks mentorship is for this National Mentoring Month listicle.

1. The first result and usually what most people are looking for is the dictionary definition provided by Oxford Languages.

Source: https://www.google.com/search?q=mentorship&source=lmns&bih=889&biw=1264&rlz=1C5GCEM_enUS1011US1011&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj23cr0jsX8AhXrPUQIHd-NCiAQ_AUoAHoECAEQAA

2. Usually the next result is the Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mentorship), which sure enough, gives a little history lesson on the origin of mentorship. The first mention of Mentor is from Homer’s Odyssey. Mentor was a friend of Odysseus and when Odysseus left for the Trojan War, Mentor was assigned to guide his son Telemachus. Mentor was later adopted and used when referencing someone who imparts wisdom to someone less-experienced.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mentor_%28Odyssey%29

3. For more visual learners, we switched to an image search. Looking past results of stock photos are multiple word clouds which include words that are associated with mentorship such as guide, personal development, learning, help, etc.

Source: istockphoto.com

4. Another helpful visual is an illustration of a person’s mind expressing advice, support, help, and guidance.

Source: https://www.ala.org/advocacy/diversity/odlos-blog/mentorship-tricks

5. For those curious about what is trending on social media about mentorship, out of the 2,229,826 posts on Instagram that use the hashtag, #mentorship, here are the top 3 posts (@leadbestco, @markpollard, and @visualartspassage) found on the day of the search that ranges from leadership advice to advertising experience to portrait art.

6. On Twitter, the Twitter user @NatalieFikes shares their definition of mentorship in the tweet below.

7. And for those interested in the latest tech trends, we even tried running mentorship through an AI (artificial intelligence) image generator. The generator takes the definition of mentorship from Wikipedia and creates images of what it thinks mentorship looks like. The results are interesting, to say the least.

Source: https://wandb.ai/telidavies/ml-news/reports/Craiyon-Image-Generator-From-Text-Online-Demo-formerly-DALL-E-Mini---VmlldzoyMTY5Nzk5#:~:text=Craiyon%20is%20an%20AI%20model,initially%20named%20DALL%2DE%20Mini.

As you can see here, mentorship can be a lot of different things to a lot of different people (and machines). But at the heart of it, mentorship is the guidance given by a more experienced person to a less-experienced person who is seeking that knowledge. A mentorship can be formal or informal, short or long, and structured or unstructured, but no matter how one comes across one, it is impactful. Torace can ensure that your mentorships are the most impactful by making the best matches for your mentors and mentees. Email [email protected] for more information.