Freshman Mentoring: Creating A Baseline For Faculty Involvement

Mentoring may have become a lost art in higher education. Even at its best, faculty mentoring was typically limited to the paternal protection of a promising young colleague. Occasionally, this involved a gifted undergraduate. Seldom was such benevolence exhibited toward those “atrisk” freshmen most in need of developing a connection with the university. In more recent years the mentor function has been transferred to peers. While this may be less stressful “psychologically,” it is also a little like turning sex education over to contemporary practitioners (while there are certainly historic and psychological precedents, there might also be a pattern of misinformation). As more and more entering freshmen are under-prepared for higher education, the need for mentoring becomes much greater. While we can not properly “mentor” all of our students (and continue to fulfill our other faculty responsibilities), without some experience mentoring freshmen we will have little meaningful advice for peer mentors, and will have no way of anticipating outcomes for the mentoring that does occur. Attempts at mentoring are often restricted by our willingness to make a significant investment in someone beyond our own family or circle. When this reluctance is overcome, the mentor accepts a new individual into her coterie, where the relationship becomes protected by an ethic of care [1]. From this point, the mentor’s decisions are focused on developing the individual and caring for the mentor relationship. While active mentoring may only last for a few weeks to a few months, the result is a long-term social bond (I can think of three teachers who invested sufficient mentoring on me to develop such a bond). To establish a baseline for faculty involvement in the mentoring process, I took advantage of the fact that I have an entering, moderately under-prepared freshman son who wants to study engineering. Because I know this student very well, I am particularly cognizant of his needs. Because of the familial relationship, there are no restrictions on my willingness to help him succeed during his freshman year. Together these circumstances create a baseline for optimum mentor input. This paper will discuss mentoring activities engaged in during the first semester of study, time commitments on my part, and suggestions for how these “faculty” mentoring activities might be expanded to a larger number of students, either through extended faculty involvement or through the coordinated participation of peers.