Things to remember for next semester...

             It was really nice to have Megan, Brooke and Josh talk about some of their previous experiences with peer mentoring! This advice should really help me to be prepared for some of the situations I wouldn’t have thought about for next semester.

            Probably the most important thing that I learned from this week’s class is that the planning for the week will take a lot longer than I thought! I thought it would take at least a half hour but up to two hours, wow! Hopefully with this knowledge I can make sure to have this time blocked out on Sunday’s of next fall. Another thing I felt was important relating to making lesson plans was to start the plan for the week early so that you and your co-mentor have time to think about different ideas. This will help to reduce the time you have to work on this stuff especially when you have a busy week coming up! The final major thing I learned was that there will be some really awkward situations that we may go through as mentors. Depending on how we handle these situations it can be easily dealt or not so easy…but just make sure to keep it an enjoyable experience!

            One of the things that I am really worried about is the situation of having a student that will not do the blog posts, comments, or come to class. I know that they gave us an example of this however I didn’t feel like I received a strong answer of how to deal with this. To me it seemed like they pretty well had the student just continue to resist and not do the assignments so if anyone has a good idea of how to deal with this situation please let me know!

The final lesson!

Makayla and Nicole had a really fun presentation on Thursday! The game show “Clueless and in College” was super fun and exciting because we had great involvement from both the participants and the audience! Also, talking about good versus bad qualities of a peer mentor helped me to realize that there can be some bad peer mentors so that’s what I don’t want my mentees to have to deal with!

            I really liked talking about the different qualities that we think make up a good peer mentor. As most of us know, to be a good mentor you have to make yourself very available as a mentor. You must be able to put in the time to make your mentees appreciate your help and want to come back for more of your help and support. Some other qualities that we talked about were being able to refer a mentee to the correct person if you are unable to help out. This makes you more trustable to your mentee but also really helps your mentee out more than what you would have.

Now on to the not so good qualities that we talked about…..to start off I would like to talk about Sam’s drunk CA. When you’re in a mentoring position it is really important to remember that you are a role model to many of your students! When you go out and get drunk for a week strait that doesn’t go over well in you mentees eyes. Another good example we had was a mentor who didn’t have encouragement for group participation and activities as well as didn’t have regular meetings. This really discourages your quiet students from getting out and meeting new people but it also makes the group less connected.

After going through last week’s lesson I can’t wait to find out who my co-mentor is and meet my mentees this fall! Great job Makayla and Nicole on finishing out the semester with a fun lesson!

Using Resources

Katie and Shawn presented about the use of different resources on campus and whether they were personal, academic, or career focused, or all three. This presentation really reminded me of how I used resources to help myself through my freshman year as well as different parts of my sophomore year so far. After realizing what different resources I used I decided to choose to write about the last given situation which was the one concerning William wanting to change his major. I chose this situation because it was never a problem for me but seems to be a problem for many students so I should definitely be ready for this problem. To start off I would inform him that many students come to college having no idea what major to go with. To address this problem you must first figure out what area of study you are interested in. I would ask him what his background is and what college he is most interested in: Business, Agriculture, Life Sciences, Design, etc. Once I found this out I would be able to further help him by setting up an appointment with career services to make sure this is a good choice for him. I would tell William that I had never changed my major before and have not had much experience when it comes to knowing about different majors so I am not the best help to solve the problem and that is why I am referring him to the career services building. To me this is a more urgent situation so it should be taken care of quickly. By me attending this meeting with my student I feel as if they will be more prompted to go to the resource again and to build the student’s confidence in the resource. After this referral I would make sure to ask if William thought this resource was helpful or not and then give him time to think about all of the different things that were discussed during the referral. About a week later I would check back in with him to make sure the problem is getting fixed or else I would find another resource to use to fix this problem.

Academic Success

Definitely should have written this before spring break…. but oh well, let’s just see where this goes! So Courtney and Kayla presented during our last class and their topic was academic success as we should all know. Two major points they worked on was external/internal motivation and being an encourager/discourager. Both of these points were great at inspiring and promoting thought about my own academic success and how to promote success in my own mentees.

            External and internal motivations are often hard to see until you actually slow down and think about how you function. I personally am motivated by both depending on what I am dealing with in terms of it being academic success or a club activity. External motivation is my main drive to be successful through academics because I like to study with friends to obtain better results. My friends' external motivation is usually very positive to make me want to study more to continue to be successful academically however I can also use my internal motivation to push myself to study hard for each test I will be facing. When it comes to dealing with club activities that I have been designated to be a chair for or on the committee, I feel as if it is my obligation to get everything done because I have been appointed to this position and been trusted to do my part to make the activity successful.

            Now with the encourager/discourager part, I personally try to do nothing but encourage my friends to be successful whether that is in academics or work. However, I do discourage activities such as drinking and smoking because of the negative impacts these activities will have on your life and the effects it will have on your loved ones. I know that encouragement pushes me to continue to do better so that is why I continue to do this myself.

            I hope that what I learned during this past class period can really help me to make my mentees successful and assist them in figuring out how they are motivated!! I hope you all had a wonderful spring break and see you all later this week!

ISCORE event

            So, I was only able to attend one ISCORE event because I had classes from 8-9:30 and from 11-5. Anyways, the one event I made it to was very interesting and made me think more about how every individual student may be affected by their own different background but should be able to feel at home here at Iowa State University due to our great diversity. The presentation was about how student’s different socio economic status and their social class can affect a student’s ability to attend college as well as feel accepted at the college. They started off by talking about the different human races and how that can affect their chances of attending college. Next they discussed how it is very difficult for the lower economic class families to support their students through higher education. The last part of the presentation was a discussion about various topics and points that individuals in the crowd wanted to talk about. This discussion was pretty interesting especially when some lady from Alabama talked about how they have various programs specifically aimed towards Hispanics or other racial groups to help them continue through college and feel more at home. I know that ISU also has specific programs for these situations; however the discussion brought new ideas to the table to help our different racial groups coming to ISU. The main thing that I got from this presentation was that we as peer mentors must realize that our mentees can come from many different socio economic statuses and social classes but must be able to understand as well as accommodate for these differences.

Leading Groups and Problem Solving!

            I hope everyone enjoyed the intense and close basketball game on Saturday! As you all know Nikki and I presented during our class on Thursday. I thought overall for this being our first time leading a class we did pretty well. I know that I have some things that I personally need to work on and continue to strive to get better at such as speaking louder and more clearly as well as not just going off of the outline for our presentation. Besides those personal things, our topic was about the various aspects of how to lead groups effectively. We started off by going over our introduction followed by the discussion and situational strips we provided. I think our situational strips really helped our fellow peer mentors by providing real situations that we, as peer mentors, may run into throughout our experience as a peer mentor.

            At the retreat Sunday Brooke and Sam presented their presentation about chapter 5 Problem Solving with Individuals from the week we missed class due to the snowy weather. They both had to remind most of us about the different things we read in the chapter because it was such a little while ago! During their discussion they explained the ways to formulate a diagnosis about a problem and the three sources of a problem. These three sources are the gap, the hole, and the obstacle which they explained to us and gave greater insight about. We talked about the different sources and explained how to deal with these different situations. We also talked about ways to problem solve by thinking outside of the box. Some of the really great ideas we came up with to think outside of the box were to think while in the shower and brainstorm together.

            During the retreat we had several ice breaker activities that were all great ideas to use for our own mentoring groups. Although some of the activities, such as Kayla’s, I feel would be better to use that later in your semester with your students to get to know the stuff about them that they may be scared to write down or say out loud. Otherwise I felt like the retreat went great!

Round Two: Social Media Week

           This week was the second time I was required to use some type of social media program through the Hixson program and once again I had to use Twitter for a week. This second experience was a lot of fun compared to the first experience because I somewhat knew what I was doing. I still kind of don’t understand how some parts of Twitter work but still had a great time using it for this past week. During this second experience of using Twitter I got two main ideas from it. The first was that this experience really helped us as a group of peer mentors to become closer and get to know each other. By doing this I think that growing a stronger relationship between us will help us to build strong relationships between our peer mentees and us. I also noticed that everybody is sick and tired of the snow and cold weather which I can definitely agree with!

            I really enjoyed the Angie and Kira’s presentation and activities because they were both very informative and hands on learning! Although the Lego project was frustrating because we were given a role that may not be in our comfort zone or a role we usually like to do, I still really enjoyed the activity because it was different from previous group’s presentations and made us realize that we may have to control ourselves in group situations to complete a job successfully.

            Now for Allie’s presentation about social media, the major things that I took away from her presentation were that “social media is like a tattoo” and “don’t put anything up that you would be embarrassed to see on the front of a newspaper.” Both of these phrases really make sense and greatly explain how to use social media correctly by thinking about whether your tweet or post may negatively represent or affect you or your future. I think that allowing us to tweet during Allie’s presentation was also very funny and enjoyable too!