As members of the Class of 2019 flock to campus, several specialized peer mentoring groups have been preparing for their arrival, whether it be evaluating best practices or recruiting new mentors. These groups offer services tailored to different student needs and backgrounds.
First-Year Student Enrichment Program
The First-Year Student Enrichment Program is specific to first-generation students. This year, FYSEP has 56 members of the Class of 2019 participating and 26 upperclassmen mentors, FYSEP director Jay Davis said. The mentors have been working with the new students for the entire pre-orientation program and will continue to work with them throughout the academic year.
“Since these are students who are the first in their family to attend college, there’s even more need for discussing some of the assumptions that people have about college and allowing them the opportunity to understand the experiences of older students,” Davis said.
The role of mentors in FYSEP is particularly important because they can provide valuable guidance and serve as sources of information to students for whom college is “a more unknown entity,” he said.
While about 75 percent of the mentors were FYSEP participants themselves, Davis said not every mentor was the first in his or her family to attend college.
“Finding wonderful people is our first priority, and then certainly experience as a FYSEP student is an added plus in the application process,” Davis said.
This year’s program has an increased focus on talking to both the mentors and the mentees about the best practices in mentoring programs, Davis said, in order to elucidate the process of mentorship for all participants.
“What we’ve done is shared with our mentees the most important pieces of our training of the mentors,” Davis said. “So that both the mentee and the mentor have a common understanding of what some of our objectives are and some of the best practices for making the most of the mentoring relationship on both sides.”
Davis emphasized that all of the mentoring programs are important for all involved, describing the process as “enriching” for both the mentor and the mentee and often “transformative” for the mentor.
“Clearly, for the mentees it is an opportunity to learn from the experiences of upper class students, but for the mentors themselves it’s an opportunity to learn through the process of reflection and consolidation,” he said.
FYSEP is unique in its focus on encouraging students to learn from their mistakes and treats failure as a learning opportunity, Davis added.
“There is no single Dartmouth experience — that’s for sure,” Davis said. “But I think the opportunity to try to make sense of your experience by sharing it with others is a really helpful process.”
Being a mentor provides an opportunity to reflect on one’s own Dartmouth experience and use it to help others, Davis said.
“Dartmouth students are very good at doing things and accomplishing things and participating in things, and there sometimes is not as much emphasis on reflecting on what’s being done,” he said.
Women in Science Program
The Women in Science Program was established in 1992 and has kept a fairly consistent program model ever since, program director Kathy Weaver said.
Though the program has not yet started for this year, she said, numbers are expected to remain similar to past years — 150 to 200 participants per year. Last year saw 80 first-year students requesting to be matched with 70 upperclassmen mentors, though typically there are roughly 100 first-year participants, she said.
So far this year, there are 63 mentors signed up, and the program will start recruiting mentees during orientation, she said.
The program has gone through slight changes, but the overall format remains consistent: mentors and mentees are matched in the fall after mentors are trained, there is a kickoff event in mid-October, the program works with the Academic Skills Center during winter term, there is a summer leave term informational center as well as two events each for winter and spring term, Weaver said.
By the spring term, many first-years have “gone off on their own” or decided to pursue fields outside the sciences, Weaver said. At this point, the WISP program focuses on programming during Dimensions, she said.
In recent years, many sophomores have returned to participate as mentors, Weaver said.
“They’re highly motivated because they’ve just come through their own freshman year,” she said. “They’re either very grateful that they had the mentor that they had and want to give back, there’s also people who didn’t have a mentor and want to give back in that way.”
WISP also sees a high number of seniors participate as mentors, Weaver said.
“Seniors are feeling very wistful, and feel like they have a lot to offer and want to give back,” she said.
WISP has a clear purpose to reach out to and support women who arrive with an interest in science, math, engineering and pre-health, Weaver said.
“It’s not purely academic, because academic, personal and social growth is all connected as a first-year student,” she said, though the interest in science provides a clear distinction from other programs.
Link Up
Link Up, a first-year mentoring program for all female students at Dartmouth, expects to see nearly 400 total participants, with roughly 180 incoming freshmen and 200 upperclassmen mentors, co-president Liz Gold ’17 said.
Link Up allows upperclassmen with various D-plans to participate, she said, by pairing each participant who is off in the fall with another upperclassman mentor who is on campus in order to create a “family,” she said.
Gold said that Link Up has many unique activities on its schedule already, including canoeing by the river, an alumni panel, a jewelry studio event and a hike.
“[The activities] are often different from the other typical first-year mentoring programs,” she said.
The program itself will be largely similar to last year’s, she said, but the program has grown significantly since her freshman year, when there were only 80 participants and the mentorships were not D-plan flexible.
“Now, anyone who wants to be a mentor can be,” she said. “We really like our program to be fluid: if you want to commit your time, we trust you and we want you to sign up, and we think a lot of varying interests and backgrounds are really important to our program, so we have all different types of students involved.”
