"Just the fact that the mentors are in college rubbed off on them," she says. "Maybe they wanted to be a hairdresser before, but by the end of the year almost 90 to 100 percent of the girls were saying they wanted to go to college, a real benefit that we observed."

But mentors agree that the program often teaches them just as much as it does the seventh graders.

Cardozo says Slatin was essential to a video she recently made for another GSE class, in which she was required to create a portrait in any medium of someone from the GSE community.

Slatin not only served as the subject of the portrait, but also provided necessary technical assistance, according to Cardozo.

"She's better at engineering than I am," Cardozo says. "The first day she showed me how to use the camera."

Cardozo says the mentoring experience has taught her concepts that articles and classes cannot teach.

"In all the courses I take about adolescent girls' development they kind of get lumped together in a group," she says. "They're all individuals...It's important to know all the theory behind what's going on, but sometimes you have to put the book down and look at her and listen to her, even if it isn't what the book says."