Mentor's Advice_1 The world "advice" often confuses Russian learners, as it's uncountable in English and countable in Russian. Today I'm going to use this word 17 times during my speech, let's see how many times will be grammatically correct. Did you know that in Soviet time USSR was called “a country of advice”? That’s a joke, however still we are often advised on different topics by many different people from our babushka to an unknown man in metro. Sometimes we don’t even ask for it. Are they informed enough of our current situation? Do they have right to give us some advice? Do they have more life experience? Who are those people who’s advise we follow? Most of us would probably agree that our environment has a great influence on us. At the same time the choice of our environment might be thoughtless and given to mercy of fate. They same if you are the cleverest one in the room, you are in the wrong room. We spend a lot of time communicating with our school teachers who share their knowledge sometimes not limited by school program, educate us, teach us to act in society and have a great influence on child’s mind. Do we choose our school teachers? Quite often even our parents do not have an opportunity to do so. I know a story when a school teacher manager to develop the worst student in the class into the best one and can only imagine how much efforts he used spending extra time and paying extra attention to the child. Belief and right attitude made their job and of course that’s possible only in 1 to 1 work. We can call such a teacher a real mentor. A teacher taking responsibility for your diploma project has much stronger connection with you as a professional and his personality has bigger influence on you than just a lecturer. Will you call him a mentor? TM divides such concepts as “a coach” and “a mentor”. A coach is working on you in a short-term manner with a specific goal and usually this goal is skill-based. He takes responsibility on the methods how you will achieve that goal. By the way did you know that here in Russia we have negative connotations to the word “coach”. Once you say coach we imagine a 20-years old young man who pretends to be super-productive, super-effective and rich and who says he will teach you how to reach the same if you pay him. So be careful with using this word.