Who Are Peer Mentors?
Peer mentors in the Department of Engineering Education (EEd) assist faculty with first-year engineering courses, helping students get engaged and excited about engineering. They are junior and senior students who have previously taken the courses they mentor, demonstrating technical skills, communication, and empathy.
Why Are Peer Mentors Important?
Peer mentors help ensure a meaningful hands-on experience for 1,200 first-year students, guiding them with technical skills such as using tools, microelectronics, programming, and engineering design. They also provide individual attention in the makerspace, helping students during hands-on sessions and ensuring a safe experience.
Peer mentors are also hired to represent a variety of student backgrounds, engineering majors, and personal experiences, ensuring that all students feel comfortable seeking guidance during their transition into college and engineering studies.
What Else Do Peer Mentors Do?
In addition to helping faculty in class, peer mentors hold open nighttime mentoring hours where students can receive technical and social support. They offer advice on topics like engineering student societies, course selection, internships, and navigating their engineering departments.
How Do Peer Mentors Benefit?
Peer mentoring provides leadership development for junior and senior students, helping them develop technical, communication, and leadership skills. The experience improves their credentials for graduate school or engineering careers. Mentors gain problem-solving skills by helping first-year students with issues like redesigning solid models, debugging code, and writing design reports.
Quotes From Former Peer Mentors
“As a current Ph.D. student in advanced manufacturing, I credit my current career path trajectory to the years I spent as an Engineering Design & Society peer mentor. Teaching my peers ignited my passion for engineering education, and the opportunity to hone my communication and technical skills through this program provided invaluable preparation for my later industry and academic research positions. This position showed me my potential as an engineer, and the impact that multidisciplinary engineering and design can have on society.”
-Lisa DeWitte
“Being a peer mentor has helped me understand microcontrollers and the design process on a much deeper level. This knowledge directly enhanced my internship and research positions. It’s never felt like a job or a chore to do, it’s always a fun and enriching opportunity and I hope more students get to experience it. Seeing students go from novices to experienced makers in just a few weeks as a result of our mentorship and the course material is really inspiring to see.”
-Lenworth (TJ) Thomas
“Being a peer mentor allowed me to see the other side of education by giving me the opportunity to be the teacher instead of the student. Through this experience, I learned to express myself clearly, demonstrate authority effectively, listen intently, and foster positive interactions among my students. I feel that I was able to not only help other students develop their engineering skills, but also develop transferable skills that I apply as an engineer in the real world.”
-Camila Ziadi
“Being a peer mentor means stepping up as a leader and fostering critical thinking and teamwork among students. As a peer mentor, I had to not only have a strong knowledge base for my own understanding, but also had to think outside the box and convey that understanding to students learning the material for the first time. This level of communication is essential in any professional environment and will be critical as I move into a Supply Chain Operations Manager role with Frito-Lay. This is the best class I have been able to be a part of at the University of Florida, and I look forward to watching it grow and evolve.”
-Rachel Blaydes
“Even with three years of student organization leadership experience, I landed my first internship mainly by discussing my role as a peer mentor in Engineering Design and Society. That internship (which became a full-time role) centered around being able to break down technical topics and market them on a more basic level. I believe that helping students to understand engineering design concepts – and guiding them through debugging and troubleshooting – gave me the skills I needed to get the job. I also learned so much about 3D modeling that I never would’ve been exposed to as an electrical engineering major. Since starting as a peer mentor in this program, I am truly a more well-rounded engineer.”
-Olivia Brandel