Mentoring & Advising
Mentoring & Advising
The Peer Mentorship Program (PMP) is designed to assist in the transition to graduate school life by pairing up a first-year PhD student wit a graduate student in a higher cohort. I have done it for the past three years with three different mentees. We meet outside of the office once a month for both fall and spring semesters.
I provide resources and commiseration through courses and adjusting to graduate-level research, but the main experience is helping them balance classwork and research with a social life. This is primarily done through encouraging them to take part in the established graduate student community and forming study groups within their cohort to form bonds and friendships.
A frequently asked question is how to best divide time between those three parts of life as a graduate student. I provide some resources but mainly just tell them how I do it and the route that I took to learn these skills (I now live by my calendar). If that doesn't interest them, I also refer them to some of my fellow grad students who have different strategies if those interest them.
I served as a mentor to an undergraduate student during their time in the ACREs REU Program in the summer of 2023. We met biweekly and discussed high-level research techniques and best practices, effective communication strategies between them and their advisor, and assimilating to the Lansing metro area for the summer. Additionally, I provided tips and guidelines for applying to graduate school since they were planning on applying a few months after.
(The name of this mentee is not included due to not having permission.)
The fall of 2022 a faculty member in CMSE taught a section of UGS 101 which is a freshman seminar designed as an introduction to scholarship and inquiry. He asked for volunteers to serve as a mentor which would meet with their students three times throughout the semester to assist with the transition from high school to college, and the higher level thinking, analysis, and maturity that college professors expect. I was assigned three students and we primarily met online over zoom individually. We also met for lunch one day as the four of us. I helped with time management skills, adjusting to a new environment, and how to situate yourself to make friends and succeed socially as an undergraduate.
(The names of this mentee are not shared due to not having permission.)
The Peer Mentorship Program is a part of the Society of Physics Students group at the University of Alabama that started while I was president of the club. This involves sorting the students into "families" each year as a way to force and encourage students to form bonds and friendships outside of their normal study groups and that span different classes. There would be two heads of each family, who would be upper-level students and at least one of which would be a member of the leadership team, and these families would compete in various competitions such as trivia nights and campus-wide scavenger hunts throughout the year. The concept is similar to the houses at Hogwarts in Harry Potter.
This program helped create accountability and encouragement in partaking in the vibrant undergraduate physics community for those who needed it. As a relatively small department with roughly 115 undergraduate physics majors, every major was assigned a family at the beginning of the year. Since SPS is open to non-majors as well, friends and minors were also welcome and could sign-up for an assignment into a family.
The SPS PMP system is still in effect today and has maintained similar efficacy in bringing new students into the community as well as maintaining involvement.