Peer Leadership Mentors are part of a highly immersive leadership program. They provide guidance to first-year students and facilitate a section of the First-Year Fellowship, while completing a 1.5 credit course that will help make meaning of the skills needed to excel in future roles.
Through this leadership co-curricular experience, upperclass students are challenged to mentor and engage first-year students to help foster and supplement the journey of the First-Year Fellowship. Developing students’ competencies in peer leadership and effective influence, this series prepares the Peer Leadership Mentors (PLMs) to properly represent, advocate, and lead their peers. Simultaneously, our PLMs are working to develop an aptitude for critical analysis, social consciousness, and emotional intelligence in order to be prepared for the professional world to which they are about to embark.
In an experience consisting of mentoring, programming, facilitation, and curriculum design, the PLMs will develop transferable skills and apply them in an influential leadership role. To prepare them for those responsibilities, PLMs are enrolled in a seminar that focuses on community organizing, group dynamics, and emotional intelligence. Building a community amongst themselves, our PLMs will use this information to build rapport with their mentees and evoke positive change.
Peer Leadership Mentors will lead opportunities such as:
- Mentoring a group of 4-5 first-year students through the First-Year Fellowship
- Facilitating a class about leadership styles for 30 Fellowship students
- Organizing a leadership program for the department to support first-years in transition
- Actively participating in an 8-week, 1.5 credit course that will help make meaning of the skills needed to excel in future roles
Peer Leadership Mentors develop skills in:
- Servant Leadership, learning about the context of leadership styles, the necessary traits of servant leaders, and how to be a servant leader in your own life.
- Ethical Decision-making, developing an awareness of values and how they influence ethical views and critically thinking about how ethics and morals contribute to decisions.
- Storytelling, understanding the benefits and components of storytelling, and learning ways to incorporate storytelling in work.
- Passion and Purpose, clarifying passions and purpose, and learning strategies to actualize those passions in order to find success in life.
The Peer Leadership Mentorship Program provides the opportunity to foster the growth of first-year students as you develop skills in mentoring, programming, and facilitation. The seminar focuses on community organizing, group dynamics, and emotional intelligence in preparation for and continuing throughout mentoring in the spring semester.
