Thank you for watching our video. Your question is very interesting! For this first cohort of undergraduate students, participating in our program was their first experience with research. We vision the mentoring side as a network where undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty work together and support each other building community. Our Latina students have even mentioned seeing more women in the lab than in their own classes, which has triggered a sense of camaraderie and friendship. This shows already an improvement in their college experience. 

That's great to hear; increased representation in lab settings is a fantastic outcome. 

A next step would be the involvement of one of the members of this cohort as a mentor in the following group. This will allow us to give some continuity and speed up the process of learning and transferring knowledge, not only among peers of the same cohort but also among consecutive cohorts. The learning curve of our technical tools (Robot Operating System) is steep at first, so having a conversation with someone who has recently faced all the challenging situations encountered while learning ROS is seen as a critical need

More attention is needed regarding the interaction between participants. Since these students come from different academic departments and different academic levels, we have observed that it is very challenging to have a group of students (women) that interact often on a daily basis. Most of the time they see different partners every day. We will try to find a better way to coordinate schedules for the next cohort.

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Luis

This is a great idea Luis. Like you said it will save time with the experienced mentors can build on what has worked and not worked to make improvements. We have what we call peer mentors with our Passion-Driven Statistics model. These are undergraduate students that have taken the introductory statistics course and now serve as a mentor to students currently enrolled. We do find that students in the class are more comfortable going to the peer mentor versus the instructor for help. Many of our partners require one session a week with a small cohort of students and their peer mentor without the instructor. We also find that peer mentors that return for a second or more time as a peer mentor are much better at helping the new peer mentors learn the ropes.

Are you/do you plan to collect data from the mentors? We have found the formal feedback from our peer mentors invaluable in the early stages and do plan to write that data up when we get closer to the end of our third phase of funding in a few years.

Thank you for watching our video, Kristin. Peer mentors play a quite important role in undergraduate students. We will collect data from mentors through two interview protocols. The first interview protocol will examine program and activities expectations, and prior leadership and mentoring experiences. The second protocol will address professional development, mentoring outcomes, and the effectiveness of mentoring training. Other documents generated by mentors reflecting on their research experiences through journaling, documenting practices, and completing training activities will be also used as part of the data collection.

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Cecilia

Sounds like you will have a lot of qualitative data to comb through that will be very valuable to your project.

Thank you for your comment and question, Bhaskar Upadhyay. Besides acquiring experience outside of what they are learning in classrooms through research, Latinx students value having a supportive group of peers who help each other. Sharing cultural values and communal effort to eventually help others are remarkable characteristics perceived among Latinx (in particular Latinas) undergraduate students in STEM.