Interdisciplinary STEM Peer-mentoring and Distance-based Teams

A Midwestern university has implemented a stepping stone, peer-mentoring approach to supporting STEM scholarship recipients. Building on the success of a National Science Foundation-sponsored scholarship program, the program has expanded to include students in a broader array of majors as well as students learning at a distant site. While the financial support is invaluable to students, the mentoring, connection and community aspects of the program are also important to their success and persistence. This paper describes the expansion of the program as well as the experience of using technology to build and maintain connections between the main and satellite campuses. Our experiences indicate that early face-to-face interactions are essential to user satisfaction and patience with technological glitches, to community building, and ultimately in establishing strong mentoring relationships. All of these have the potential to lead to a productive discussion-based seminar and to the long-term success of collaborative student project teams, although challenges need to be addressed as they arise.