mentors. The mentor commitment is that you’ll attend at least of our overnight orientations in the summer and then that you’ll participate in welcome days and be available to answer questions from your mentees into the start of the school year. The payment for that is a $200 stipend that you get in October, November, December, somewhere around there. It’s also a resume builder. From the students who are current mentors, they elect the Mentor Council from year to year and the Mentor Council coordinates all of that with the mentors. We’re actually working on recruiting a little bit differently this year in that we have asked each returning mentor to reach out to two or three students that they worked with in the last year to tell them ‘hey you’d be a good mentor, you should apply’ because we want first or maybe second year students to be the
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mentor for the incoming students. And then the Mentor Council themselves are starting to think about, and this has shifted back and forth over the years, but right now, it’s really just a commitment through Welcome Days and then maybe some texts after that. What we’re hearing from the mentee students is that they had this mentor and then they sort of just disappeared and they’d like it to be a little bit more consistent through the fall, so the Mentor Council is trying to think of what events can we host in the fall and maybe into the winter to keep the community going. The other thing we’ve talked about in the office is, then how do we pull in ANCHOR to keep that community going after the first year? Is there a structure we can provide that is kind of like a seamless transition from one year to the next and maybe those two groups work together for some of those community building events.
Stakeholder response to “what is the one thing I didn’t ask you that you think I should have?”
Governance looks a lot of different ways and I would think about what ways could students be involved or do students want to be involved? So working with alumni, ambassadors, Mentor Council, the curriculum task force, building use, scheduling, I don’t know what ways student are involved in other places and what might that look like here? Is it really just like the community building piece or are there other things that are part of that? That would be one thing I would think about and then I would also think are there other places on campus that are doing this kind of involvement well? In a major or in a program that we could
replicate? I’m all about just borrowing from places what works well either on campus or from other universities.
Will this stakeholder agree to reconnect for further inquiry? How do they want to contacted?
N/A
Connections this stakeholder provided: Mentor Council
National Collegiate Honors Council
118 Possible next-steps:
Meet with ANCHOR and Students Council to gain insight about these groups Research programs of the National Collegiate Honors Council’s meetings Look at other Honors Colleges and see how student participation in governance
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Dialogue 10
Stakeholder Group/Location: Honors Administration – Counselor Estimated Age: ____ 20-30 ____ 30-40 __X__40-50 ____ 50+ Gender: Female
Primary Goal of this Opportunity:
To empathize with an Honors Counselor and gain insight on what Honors students typically struggle with and what incentivizes them to become more involved in Honors.
How does conducting this work reflect on your team problem statement? Our team statement is: “We will establish a way to better facilitate
communication and representation of students regarding decisions that directly affect the Frederik Meijer Honors College.” This research reflects this statement as the A is a stakeholder in the current Honors governance and thus has valuable insights about the current running of the Honors College.
Summary of Research:
This stakeholder is an Honors Counselor and Advisor. She noted that students don’t often come to her with feedback about Honors. An interesting insight mentioned was that the Honors College is difficult to define aside from being a general education replacement. Other aspects of Honors are constantly changing or are open to change and thus are not set in stone. This stakeholder emphasized that there needs to be a committed group of Honors students to lead and build up groups such as ANCHOR and the Mentor Council who then are able to engage more closely with their peers. Another interesting insight is that the
communication used to reach out to students may be outdated in this age of social media.
Important insights:
Forms of communication between faculty and students may not be effective because they are outdated and not engaging student attention
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Honors organizations should try to get freshmen involved and then try to keep them involved for the remainder of their years at college
There is a stereotype that goes along with being an Honors Student that may deter students from being too closely associated with Honors
Dialogue Questions and Response:
Note: for the first half of this interview a recording was taken. The recording failed after a certain point and in place of the exact transcription, notes have been
recorded that capture the stakeholder’s responses.