Coaching Versus Mentoring; A Pharmacy Student's Perspective

When I think of coaching, I think of my younger years when I was involved in several sports teams where my different coaches would always push me to be the best that I could be.  Mentoring is similar to this because they want to help you be the best that you can be in your respective field.  The tactics used by the two groups are different but both can be beneficial in their own right.  Coaches require you to be at a certain place at a certain time and they facilitate what will be the focus during your time together.  They have a plan of what will be happening and you have little to no say in what will happen.  Mentors, on the other hand, leave it to you to be the facilitator of the meetings.  What you will talk about in your meeting is completely up to you.  The mentee will get exactly what they put into the relationship.

Coach Tom Coughlin of the New York Giants

The act of coaching is a short term process and goals are looked to be achieved in a timely fashion.  Mentoring is a long term process where the relationship between the two people has to grow to a certain extent before both parties can get what they want out of it.  Coaching is one direction while mentoring can be a two-way street.  The mentor can get just as much and even more out of it than the mentee.  

Let's relate this to my job at Rite Aid.  There are two pharmacists that I work under.  I look to one as a coach and one as a mentor.  The coach will stress efficiency and not take the time to teach.  I get a lot of work done under their supervision in a very timely manor.  The mentor will sometimes take the time to teach me something that would be beneficial for me to know.  He will also tell me experiences from his career that he thinks that I would find useful and I also tell him different things that I am learning today in school as opposed to when he went to school a long time ago.  We both grow and learn after these interactions.

Now, let's relate this to school.  I was appointed to be an FYE mentor for this years pre-pharmacy students.  I can see how crucial it is for the mentee to be an active participant after going through this process.  I have tried my hardest to get them to ask me questions and see where their interests lie but it is much harder than I had imagined.  It really does come down to what you put in is what you get out of the relationship.


As you can see, coaching and mentoring is fairly similar in their purpose but how they go about it is where the difference occurs.  Some people respond to coaching better than mentoring and vice versa.  I believe that I respond to coaching more at the moment but I think a mentoring relationship will be the most beneficial to me in the future.