Designing the Alumni UChile Mentorship Program

Context

Universidad de Chile was building a formal Alumni Network to strengthen the long-term relationship between the university, its graduates, and its current students. Within the Provost's Office, I joined as Project Designer to define how one of the network's flagship offerings — mentorship — would actually work.

Objective

Design a mentorship model that could scale across a large and diverse alumni base while staying simple to run: clear roles, a strategic selection of participants, and a program structure that created real value for both mentors and mentees.

What I designed

I structured the program around two complementary tracks:

• Professional mentoring — pairing alumni with students and recent graduates for career guidance, industry insight, and professional development.
• Entrepreneurial mentoring — connecting experienced alumni founders and operators with student entrepreneurs to pressure-test ideas and navigate their first steps.

The guidelines I wrote defined, for each track:

• Governance and guiding principles — the objectives, scope, and operating rules of the program.
• Strategic matching — how mentors and mentees were selected and paired, by field, interests, and goals.
• Program structure — a ~6-month mentoring arc, with session cadence and clear expectations for each side.
• Operational objectives — the measurable goals the program would be run and evaluated against.

I built on an earlier pilot, reworking significant parts of it — from participant selection to the structure of the relationship — into the model above.

Outcome

The framework was adopted to run a cohort of ~15 strategically selected mentor–mentee pairs, giving the Alumni UChile network a repeatable model to connect its community across generations and keep graduates engaged over the long term.