When I left Polokwane for George, I thought I understood what I was doing.
I was taking another GIS job.
It was a short-term contract, and it took me far from home, but it allowed me to continue building experience in the field I wanted to pursue.
What I could not possibly know was that the most important consequence of moving to George had nothing to do with the job I had accepted.
The person who would eventually play a defining role in what happened next wasn’t even working there when I arrived.
A few months after I joined the organisation, a new GIS manager was appointed.
When I first met her, one of the things I asked was whether she could assist me with my professional registration. She was already professionally registered and had completed a PhD herself.
I was thinking about SAGC registration.
She started talking to me about doing a PhD.
That wasn’t entirely foreign to me. I had always wanted to complete a PhD. But wanting to do one and finding the financial means to do one were two very different things.
For the time being, my attention remained on establishing myself professionally.
She gave me GIS tasks to perform. I completed them. She assisted me with the professional registration process that I had left unfinished when I walked away from the internship.
But she continued talking about something else.
The PhD.
From the work I was producing, she had apparently become convinced that I should consider furthering my studies instead of continuing to move between short-term employment opportunities.
I explained the problem.
Funding.
Not long afterwards, she sent me a PhD scholarship opportunity at Rhodes University’s Institute for Water Research (IWR). The proposed research involved evapotranspiration estimates and rangeland management.
I applied.
I didn’t get it.
That could easily have been the end of the story.
It wasn’t.
Someone Else Kept Looking
She did not give up on the idea.
Another scholarship became available at the same institute. This one involved wetland geomorphic origin and hydrological functioning.
She sent it to me.
I applied again.
This time, I got it.
I resigned from my position in George and began my PhD journey at Rhodes University.
Only after commencing my studies did, I learn something that changed how I understood what had happened.
My GIS manager had written a strong motivational letter supporting my application and submitted it to the institute without my knowledge.
I had thought I had simply applied for a scholarship and succeeded.
What I did not know was that somebody had been advocating for me behind the scenes.
Mentorship Is Sometimes Advocacy
That experience changed how I understand mentorship.
A mentor is not simply someone who gives advice.
Sometimes mentorship means seeing abilities in another person that they have not yet fully understood themselves.
Sometimes it means forwarding an opportunity.
Sometimes it means refusing to accept someone’s first unsuccessful attempt as the end of the road.
And sometimes it means saying something positive about that person in a room they are not even in.
I had applied for the scholarship.
I had the qualifications.
I had done the work.
But telling the story as though I had achieved everything through individual effort would be dishonest.
Someone intervened.
Someone believed that I should be given an opportunity and was willing to put that belief into writing.
Young professionals are often advised to find mentors. I think that advice can sometimes make mentorship sound transactional, as though one simply finds a successful person and asks to be developed.
My experience was different.
I went to George looking for a job.
I met someone later.
I asked her to help me register professionally.
Somehow, that relationship contributed to me leaving George to start a PhD.
I couldn’t have planned any of it.
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Has someone ever seen a possibility in you that you could not yet see clearly for yourself?
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