Committee Members From This Past Year

• Mary Nuznov (Chair)
• V’Lecea Hunter (Member)
• Mike Messner (Member)
• Cassonya Carter (Member)

Vacancies for F21/W22

None for the upcoming year

As the inaugural committee, what things did you learn as a group?

We learned that mentoring is very hard to define. There is personal mentoring, academic mentoring, professional mentoring, long-term mentoring, short-term mentoring and many other way and approaches to mentoring. We first had to define what LAAN would consider mentoring in a professional capacity.
We also had to figure out how to approach an already burned out advising community to ask them to give more to their peers.

What accomplishments did your committee achieve during this past academic year? Projects and initiatives worked on?

1) Projects and initiatives worked on:
          A. Researching and defining mentoring
          B. Research other mentoring programs in existence at private corporations and universities

2) Used NACADA for connecting with other research programs-planning to interview Temple University on their mentoring program in May

3) Created rough draft mentoring intake CMS form to be hosted on LAAN Site

What work will you carry over that was unfinished to the next academic year?

1. We will be launching the mentoring program August 2021
          A. Announcing Mentoring program at Start Up- August
          B. Matching will take place in September
          C. Training for mentors and mentees in September
          D. Programming ending in either April or June
          E. When formal mentoring time period is over-assess participants

2. We will be finalizing what the mentoring committee's responsibilities will be for maintaining the matching process
          A. Policies for matching
          B. How many people can be paired
          C. Who can be paired
          D. How to handle if matching creates conflict

3. We are also going to be finalizing our mentor training materials
          A. We are utilizing materials already in existence for Peer-Mentoring programs and tweaking and reviewing

4. We are going to hope that people will be interested in participating.

How did COVID-19 impact your committee work this year?

Covid played a really large impact on our team because we were constantly forced to assess HOW much the advising community could support one another, when they were already working on support their students. We decided to officially delay the launch of our mentoring program until the 2021-2022 academic year. I think that overall delaying the program gave us more time to get our feet under us as a committee. We had more time to research and look into what we would like our program to become.