Hello! I'd like to introduce Paola Bandini, our co-presenter Pam Natera, and myself, Martha Mitchell.

We are extremely pleased to have the opportunity to show you the outcomes from our one-one-one faculty mentoring program for a cohort of undergraduate engineering students at New Mexico State University. This is a structured, multi-semester mentoring program. We have continued to provide support and interaction in a hybrid model this past year.

What an impressive program - with really impressive results! This program is sponsored by the NSF... is there sustainability planning for this work post-NSF funding? Is the approach something that you think any school or college might adopt, even without external funding?

Love this project!  Is the mentor template and SESSI available online?  Have others tried using them?

Thanks for watching our S-STEM project video.  The SESSI instrument is not posted online at this time, but anyone can have a copy and use it by contacting our co-Principal Investigator Muhammed Dawood <dawood@nmsu.edu>. SESSI is being used in two ongoing NSF S-STEM projects and was developed in another NSF grant (PI: Dawood), all in the College of Engineering at New Mexico State University. 

We plan to post the mentor-student agreement template in our project webpage this summer at https://s-stem.nmsu.edu/

Great program! I know many faculty are extremely busy and it is great that you have been able to recruit faculty volunteers. Is there any advice you can give other programs who would like to do the same on a limited budget?

Very impressive! Congrats!!!

Thanks for visiting our project video. To implement this mentorship model, it is important to have the support of the College’s leadership. The College and Departments should incorporate the faculty participation into the Allocation of Effort and Annual Performance Evaluation criteria with a meaningful weight. In these documents, faculty mentorship could be incorporated as part of the faculty advising/teaching contributions, college-level or departmental service, and/or faculty contribution to student retention. Our advice is to carefully select the faculty mentors (e.g., matching interests, career paths, and personal interest or motivation of the faculty member on mentoring students). Documenting the positive impact of faculty mentorship on student success and degree completion will also help secure institutional support at the college and departmental levels to recognize the volunteer participation of mentors.

Very impressive results!  I will reach out to co-Principal Investigator Muhammed Dawood @ dawood@nmsu.edu regarding the SESSI instruments. Thank you for your kind offer.

Very meaningful! Thanks for sharing

Thank you for watching our video and for your positive feedback!

Very interesting your program and the research attached to it. Me and my colleagues have a similar project in UTSA. I was wondering about the metacognition and self-efficacy section. Have you published any article/presentation regarding this section or can you share any references that you are using to draw for this section? Thanks for your great work and for your video. I really like it!!!! 

The one on one mentoring and group networking sound like excellent resources for students. Do you have any results yet in terms of graduation rates or academic achievement?

Thank you for watching our video. We agree with you on the positive impact of the one-on-one mentoring and group mentoring on student performance and retention/graduation. Out of the 28 Scholars of the first cohort, 25 students completed their degrees, 2 continue in their academic programs (and continue participating in the S-STEM project activities with the second cohort), and 1 student withdrew from the university (for reasons not related to academic performance or academic standing). The second cohort includes 19 new Scholar and they are all scheduled to graduate by spring 2022.