Peer mentoring

For example, we'll have graduate students well-versed in coding share tips and strategies to work with and make code more efficient. Students in our department have a large range of research experiences, from plant community dynamics to avian neuroscience. In connecting with one another, we are exposed to a diversity of questions and research methods.

Recently at one of our monthly meetings, we were discussing how we never see some students in our program, and how some of these students drop out after a few years without anyone really noticing. One way to address this may to be to use mentor-mentee relationships to integrate new students and diversify our Learning Community. So with a few other members of my graduate student organization, I started an informal mentoring program aimed at integrating new graduate students into our department.

We had current graduate students interested in being a mentor write a personal paragraph about themselves so that incoming graduate students could choose a current graduate student as a mentor before starting their first semester. The goal of the mentoring relationship is that the mentor reaches out to invite the new graduate students to department social events, makes new graduate students aware of organizations on campus (such as the TAA, Wisconsin Ecology), classes that are useful to take (i.e., graduate seminars that are not broadly advertised), and checks in to see how new graduate students are adjusting to life in Madison. For example, our fall retreat is a wonderful time to spend time with other graduate students in our program, but sometimes newer students who haven't been able to come to department functions thus far don't feel comfortable with suddenly putting their name on the Google sign-up sheet without knowing anyone. A mentor reaching out to encourage them to come overcomes this initial barrier to join the group.

Fall 2017 was our first semester implementing the program! Next, we will evaluate how mentors and mentees felt about the program and make changes with our eye on long-term sustainability as older graduate students leave and newer students take leadership positions.