Beginning this fall, the Office of Diversity Affairs has expanded upon a mentoring program for first-year students at Miami University, pairing current faculty and staff with multicultural students.
Director of Diversity Affairs Eloiza Domingo-Snyder said that although the program specifically targets students of diverse backgrounds, anyone in their first year could receive a mentor if they wish.
She added that participating faculty members will be allowed to mentor up to five students each year and will receive $200 per student in order to fund social interaction activities at least twice per semester.
"(The mentors) do not talk about what classes to take or anything, instead, they are support networks for students," Domingo-Snyder said. "We try to set (the students) up with someone to navigate them through Miami so they have consistent resources, such as if they are homesick, or if they just want to know where to go eat."
She added that the $200 available for interactions with each student is a donation from the provost.
"(The mentors and mentees) can go do dinner and lunch, a game in football, basketball and hockey here at Miami, and the Latin and Caribbean Festival in Uptown Park," Domingo-Synder said. "We are also creating a calendar of Miami events."
Domingo-Snyder said the objective of this program, patterned after University of Virginia's Center for African American Affairs, is twofold.
"First, (a goal is) to make sure first-year students feel they belong and people care about them here," she said. "Second, retention and satisfaction rates of diverse population has been low, we are trying to help those students stay here."
According to Snyder, this program is not connected with the new Access Initiative for scholarship students at Miami.
Access Initiative students are given coaches instead, and any Access Initiative students who do try to apply for a mentor will be directed toward their coaches.
A current mentor within the program, Rhonda Jackson, administrative assistant at the Women's Center, believes the program is very important and said it might have kept her at Miami instead of leaving when she was a student.
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"I wanted to give back to the university, and as an underprivileged (student) here in the 1970s it would have enhanced my experience," she said. "I left for many of the same reasons that these students face. Economic issues kept me from doing some of the things my friends would do. Now I'm able to help others navigate through my experience."
While there are no specific qualifications, faculty members do receive training before becoming mentors.
"The training was about three and a half hours one afternoon in August and it focused on being yourself, knowing that you don't have all the answers, and that you and the student can learn from each other," Jackson said. "They will make mistakes, which are part of the process. Hopefully I can help avoid some of them. This is about helping give a voice to the students, being a good listener, and being able to provide guidance in a constructive way."
Unlike last year, when the program began on a smaller scale, $200 is now being allotted to the mentor for interactions with each student. Previously, there was no money given to mentors for this program and, the costs were covered out of the pockets of the mentors.
Therefore, according to Snyder, when the program began last year, mentors started to worry that these social interactions with students were costing too much in terms of personal funding.
Cliff McNish, director of diversity and outreach and an administrator in the School of Fine Arts, said he unofficially mentored three or four students along with the one he mentored as part of the program itself last year. Each of these students befriended by McNish have remained students here.
"Many staff and faculty members do mentoring without the formal setup (of the program)," McNish said.
Snyder says that ideally, students who apply are matched with mentors who have similar interests. She gave the example of a student who wrote on her application that she enjoyed ice-skating, so she was paired up with a mentor who often took her kids ice-skating.
Although this year's application process is technically over and the pairs have all ready been matched up and are currently being introduced, Snyder said that any applicant looking for a mentor will not be turned away.
Snyder hopes this will lead to better retention rates for our diverse population at Miami along with keeping students content with the culture about campus.
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