You start outlining the proposed structure for the database by creating four tables: Students, Sponsors, Mentors, and Events. As you start figuring out where the data from the spreadsheet and other files will fit, this list of tables is working out very well.

The Events table will have a relationship to both the Students and Sponsors tables, and the Mentors table will relate to the Students table, giving each table a relationship with at least one other table without creating redundancy.

As you're defining how the tables relate to each other, you realize that you need to reference a field from the Students table in the Events table to create the relationship.