Why we need more female alumni mentors for young girls

When a young girl sees a woman who once walked the same corridors she now walks, something shifts in her sense of possibility. The shift is small at first, often barely visible, but it reshapes what she believes is available to her. Alumni of Baranagore Ramakrishna Mission Ashrama High School have always understood the quiet power of recognition, and that is why the question of female mentors for the next generation has moved from the margins to the centre of conversations in the BRKM Reunion community.

Across cities like Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth, families who trace their roots back to the Baranagore institution are raising daughters in a country that often talks loudly about equality while quietly tolerating uneven outcomes. Female alumni who have already navigated university applications, internship interviews and the first decade of a career carry a kind of practical wisdom that no textbook can offer. Sharing that wisdom is becoming less of an optional act of kindness and more of a quiet responsibility that benefits everyone in the network.

The confidence gap and visible role models

Research from Australian universities has consistently shown that girls begin to lose confidence in their abilities somewhere between upper primary and early high school, precisely the window when the BRKM Reunion community is most active. Female alumni who return to share their stories often find that their presence alone begins to undo some of that erosion. A young woman who sees a former student of her own school presenting at a careers night, leading a study circle or simply sitting in the front row of a reunion starts to imagine herself in those spaces. Visibility, repeated often enough, becomes a form of permission.

There is also a more local flavour to the problem. In suburbs like Parramatta, Cabramatta, Footscray and Canning Vale, where many alumni families have settled, daughters grow up surrounded by strong women at home and at the temple but encounter fewer female leaders in the public-facing spaces of their daily life. Female mentors from the alumni network bridge that gap by being familiar enough to be trusted and different enough to be aspirational. They speak the same mother tongue, remember the same school songs and still navigate the same Australian systems that the younger girls are learning to navigate.

Navigating education and career choices

Choosing what to study after school feels overwhelming even in calm circumstances. For a first-generation Australian student, the decision often carries the weight of a family's migration story, a parent's long-held dream and a budget that may be tighter than her classmates'. Female alumni mentors can demystify the process of applying to institutions such as the University of Sydney, UNSW, Monash, the University of Queensland and RMIT, explaining what Honours really involves, which scholarships are worth the effort and when it makes sense to consider a gap year. That grounded advice is rarely available in school career offices and almost never in the language and tone that resonates with a daughter of an alumni family.

Career choices can feel even more opaque. A mentor who has worked her way through a graduate program at a Big Four firm, a teaching hospital or a state government department in Canberra can describe the texture of those workplaces in a way no brochure can. She can warn about the years that look glossy on LinkedIn and reassure about the years that look quiet. In an Australian labour market where casual work and contract roles still shape the early twenties of many young women, having someone who has already lived through the uncertainty is worth more than a hundred motivational posters.

Cultural identity and belonging across generations

Identity is rarely settled for girls growing up in migrant communities, and Australia has plenty of those communities. A young woman may speak Bengali at home, English at school and a third language on weekend visits to her grandparents, while also being asked whether she feels really Australian by someone who barely knows her. Female alumni mentors have usually walked this tightrope themselves and can offer language for experiences that otherwise feel inarticulable. They can talk about keeping a name that teachers struggle to pronounce, about fasting through long school exams and about wearing a bindi to a Year 12 formal without turning any of it into a lecture.

The BRKM Reunion gatherings have always been gentle laboratories for this kind of intergenerational conversation. Women who attended the Ashrama school in the 1970s and 1980s sit beside recent graduates in their twenties, and the threads between them become visible over a shared plate of khichuri. Those moments of easy recognition are exactly the conditions in which mentoring flourishes. The younger girl does not feel lectured, and the older woman does not feel like she is performing her culture for an audience. Belonging is reinforced from the inside out, which is the only direction that tends to last.

Professional networks alumni can unlock

Networks in Australia still operate partly through personal introductions, and that is something female alumni mentors understand intimately. A warm email from a mentor to a partner at Allens, a contact at Telstra or a hiring manager at BHP often carries weight that a cold application cannot replicate. Mentors can also steer young women towards professional bodies such as CPA Australia, Engineers Australia, the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation and the various state teaching institutes, explaining which memberships actually matter and which can wait. The difference between a graduate who walks into her first interview with three thoughtful referrals and one who walks in alone is often the difference between two industries entirely.

There is also a softer kind of networking that alumni women can model well. Australia may have an offhand culture that hides ambition behind casual phrases like she'll be right and a love of understatement, but underneath that modesty sits a network of women who exchange favours, share job leads and put each other forward for panels. Younger girls benefit from learning this hidden curriculum early. They see that networking is not loud self-promotion but a slow accumulation of reciprocal trust, and that such trust is built through cups of coffee in suburban cafes and late-night messages about tricky workplace situations.

Giving back as a way to grow personally

Mentoring a younger girl is often described as something the older woman does for the younger one, and that framing is partly true. The younger girl gains a sounding board, a reference point and occasionally a contact who changes the arc of her twenties. The mentor, though, gains something quieter and equally valuable. She rehearses her own story out loud, notices which parts still sting and which parts she has finally made peace with. Many BRKM alumni women say that the first time they mentored a student from the school, they understood their own career for the first time as a coherent journey rather than a series of accidents.

There is also the matter of professional renewal. Engineers, accountants, doctors and lawyers in mid-career sometimes find that the daily work has lost its meaning and that the ladder they climbed has stopped feeling like the right ladder. Spending an hour a month with a teenage girl who is full of questions can restore the sense that the years of effort were worth something. In a country where mid-career women often face the double pressure of ageing parents and ambitious children, mentoring offers a rare chance to give to the next generation without overextending the household budget or the calendar.

How the BRKM Reunion community is stepping up

The committee behind BRKM Reunion has begun treating female mentorship as infrastructure rather than as an afterthought. Study sessions at the local centres, the medical camps and the competitions that the alumni already run have been quietly extended to pair accomplished alumnae with girls who show promise and hunger in equal measure. WhatsApp groups by city, modest travel subsidies for reunions and a small honour for women who have mentored across a decade are all part of the picture. None of this is dramatic, and that is precisely the point. The work happens in ordinary rooms, on ordinary evenings, with ordinary persistence.

For alumni who have been thinking about volunteering but have not yet found a doorway, the most practical step is to register with the community through the official portal at https://brkmreunion.org/ and offer even a small slice of time. A few hours a term, a willingness to read a draft university application, a phone call before a tough interview, an introduction to a colleague in a chosen field. None of these gestures is heroic on its own, but stacked across a network of women who share a common starting point, they become something much more than the sum of their parts.