Delaney Gillespie
Delaney Gillespie is an undergraduate sophomore pursuing an honors degree in Community Health. This is her first time participating in research, but she plans to continue working with Dr. Angela Chow through the rest of her undergraduate experience. After receiving her undergraduate degree, she plans to continue her education through a Physician’s Assistant program to one day become a PA.
Preparing Peer Mentors to Support College Students during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Preliminary Findings from a Virtual Support Program
Delaney Gillespie, Shuhan Yuan, Hsien-Chang Lin, and Angela Chow
Background: Virtual peer-mentoring programs have emerged as a way to support college students during the COVID-19 pandemic. A strong team of student mentors is one key to the success of such programs. Nevertheless, how to prepare and support student mentors for this role is unclear. This study evaluated how peer-mentors of a virtual peer-mentoring program were trained and the various types of support they received.
Methods: The study was conducted within the context of Connect and Thrive (C&T), a 4-week, virtual peer-mentoring program implemented in a public university in Spring 2022. Data were collected from ten student mentors (all females; 7 undergraduate and 3 graduate students) via semi-structured interviews. Preliminary analysis of the contents of the interview recordings were guided by Roddy’s Four Pillars Model of online student programs.
Results: Preliminary findings indicated that the support and training helped C&T mentors in four ways that are in line with Roddy’s model, including (1) developing a sense of community: mentors met weekly, creating a supportive environment for the peer-mentor team; (2) developing skills in supporting others’ mental health: mentors participated in training workshops (e.g., mental health first aid); (3) supporting mentees’ goal achievements: using a smartphone app, mentors had access to real-time data of their mentees’ goals and reflections, allowing more efficient support; (4) providing technology support to the mentors.
Conclusions:C&T provided sufficient training and support to the student mentors. Further work on the scalability and transferability of these training and support strategies is recommended.
Accessibility Note: To access auto closed captions (CC) services please click on the CC icon in the bottom of the video. Manual CC are available by submitting a request for services to ATAC: (812) 856-4112 or atac@iu.edu