Kathy, You are absolutely right. A mentor spends a great deal of time with a student which takes away from the time spent with clients. At the same time, LC students need an opportunity to work in a traineeship program in order to obtain a comfort level with working with clients before being out there on their own. I wish everyone's teaching preparation were as good as yours. Unfortunately, most elementary and secondary teachers who graduated when I did (also 20 years ago!) had very little classroom exposure before being put in their own classroom. We need to do whatever we can in our profession to give aspiring lactation consultants ample opportunity to learn from more experienced LCs. We encourage our colleagues to make themselves available for mentoring so that our students can develop and enhance their skills under the wing of an experienced person. At the same time, students need to be prepared to compensate the mentors for this service. Mentoring should be viewed in much the same way as is student teaching. Students pay for their semester of student teaching just as they do for semesters when they are enrolled in classroom courses. I hope all this dialogue results in a comprehensive list of seasoned LC's who will accept students in a mentoring arrangement. Judi Lauwers BSC