National Collegiate Honors Council
Date of this Version
2023
Document Type
Article
Citation
Chapter 8, pages 141-157
In: Advising for Today's Honors Students, Erin E. Edgington, editor
National Collegiate Honors Council, Lincoln, Nebraska, United States, 2023
Abstract
The University of Nevada, Reno Honors College’s approach to mentorship capitalizes on guiding students through a variety of directed activities and experiential discussions to promote critical thinking and the adoption of new, transferable knowledge. Enhancing traditional advising activities such as course selection and discovery of co-curricular opportunities, programming around mentorship additionally provides another avenue for keeping students engaged, encouraging full participation in the honors college, and improving student retention and persistence rates. Because oversight of these common metrics for success in higher education very often falls to advising staff, and because formal academic advising is a kind of mentorship, it makes sense for honors advisors to lead mentorship initiatives. At UNR, honors advisors have become so involved in mentorship that they have dubbed themselves the “Student Actualization and Engagement Team.”
conclusion Three years after the implementation of the Peer Coaching Program and two semesters into the Career and Community Mentoring Program, honors advisors are witnessing the positive impacts of these two components of Honors Beyond: The Mentorship Network. Practically speaking, a key outcome of the Peer Coaching Program has been a reduction in advisor time spent covering basic information about the honors college and its requirements and an increase in time available to engage deeply with advisees, providing the kind of guidance and value that students, especially honors students, expect from professional advising staff. Although advisors oversee the program, the peer coaches have also demonstrated extraordinary agency in moving the program forward via their work on various committees, in the FYE course, and, of course, with their mentees. As hoped, many of those mentees have already opted to become peer coaches following their first year in the honors college, thus establishing a pipeline from mentee to mentor. That pipeline is extended by way of the career and community mentoring program, which, although it is still new and developing, will afford students who served as peer coaches opportunities to seek out additional mentoring relationships as mentees even as they continue to mentor other honors students.
While the college’s mentoring programs have already paid dividends within the college, advisors clearly recognize that their new identity as facilitators of student actualization and engagement has attracted notice from beyond the college. Historically, some friction has existed between various advising units in terms of the role of students’ honors advisors vis-à-vis their major/minor/pre-professional advisors, but as the role of honors advisors at UNR becomes increasingly specialized, other professional advisors understand more clearly what it is that honors advisors do. Students’ expectations, too, are accordingly streamlined. No longer expecting simply to reconfirm their class schedule with their honors advisors, honors students can instead seek out their honors advisors for specific guidance related to honors initiatives. By incorporating peer and community mentors into the honors advising equation the Honors College at the University of Nevada, Reno has taken great strides toward serving its large and growing student body effectively while keeping advisor caseloads manageable and professional advisors accessible.
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Comments
Copyright 2023, National Collegiate Honors Council. Used by permission