Transcript of the interview with Kevin Murfitt

Part 1. Willing and Able Mentoring Program Coordinator

Kevin Murfitt is a lecturer at Deakin University and coordinator of the Willing and Able Mentoring program. Also known as 'WAM', part 1 of his interview describes how the program assists students with a disabilities in their long term career goals and how UTS students can get involved.

Kev: I am Kevin Murfitt, I work as a lecturer at Deakin University but also I am the coordinator of the Willing and Able Mentoring program which is a national mentoring program for people who have a disability, and I am also a person who is blind.

So what does Willing and Able do and how does this support tertiary students or graduates with disabilities?

Kev: The Willing and Able mentoring program or WAM program, was set up in 2000 so its been going on for a number of years now and basically what we do is we match up tertiary students who have a disability with a mentor in the career area that the student is aspiring towards, to really try and give them first hand look at the work place and what sort of job it is that they are actually studying for.

How does a student or graduate get involved in the program?

Kev: The WAM program is on the graduate careers website, so that's www.graduatecareers.com.au/wam (opens an external site) and people can go that website and fill in an application form and just submit it online to me or they can download it and post it or email it, what ever their preference is. Then provided we have go the resources in students particular location then we will source a mentor for that person and train them and get them running.

Can you give me an example of what you have done previous students. For example if they were going in to a particular industry, how does it work and for what period of time does it go for?

Kev: The WAM program, it's really simple, and that's one of the secrets as to why its grown over the last six years. In 2004 we matched nearly a hundred students across Australia with mentors in a whole range of organisations so IBM, the banks, law firms, hospitals, community service agencies really what we do is, on the application form the student will indicate what area they really would like to be mentored in and then we will go out and search for them for a mentor in that particular field of student's interest. And basically the program, after we train them and train the mentor we physically then introduce the student to their mentor and there is eight individual discussion or mentoring sessions and they are held in the mentor's workplace so the student get a real feel going in to that environment seeing what the culture is like and also seeing the range of different professions in that organisation. So it's simply a series of eight discussion meetings in the mentor's work place and they can happen every week or every fortnight. It's really up to the mentor and the mentee to timetable their sessions to suit their own other commitments. Then at the end of the program we have a debriefing session with mentors and the mentees and we have certificate presentation event to really recognise the volunteer input of the mentors and congratulate the students.

One of the main challenges for faced by any student, let alone a student with a disability, is lack of experience in the work place do you think WAM really fills this gap or fills this need for that student?

Kev: The WAM program really does make a difference I think in terms of really giving the student more confidence that they can actually achieve their career goals. It also gives them real first hand information about what that career area is like and the different roles they can play. And it also gives them contacts with really important people that might actually lead them to their future career. And for the mentors they say they gain just as much because a lot of these people have never really had first hand experience or got to know a person who has got a disability before, so they get a real I guess demystification of the disability and they learn how really irrelevant a disability is in terms of the person's potential, in the vast majority of the cases. So it's a real win-win program and I think it does make a big difference because often students who have a disability because of the cultural stereotypes don't get opportunities while they are studying to actually do a lot of workplace type internships or work experience, and so the WAM program really tries to bridge that gap.