| Stream | Peer mentors |
|---|---|
| Drug Discovery | 11 |
| Environmental Visualization | 8 |
| Public Health | 6 |
3. Sem 3 Peer Mentors
Who is in this cohort, and what does my stream do?
You are the mentor now
You are now a peer mentor for the FRI Semester 3 course, and the thing you are developing is no longer your own research skill but your ability to grow other people’s. Those are genuinely different skills. Being good at research does not automatically make someone good at mentoring, and the gap between the two is where this guide lives.
The measures in the chapters ahead are not tests. Nobody is scored as a better or worse mentor. Each one names a style or an orientation you already have, shows you where it sits relative to the rest of your cohort, and asks you to decide whether it is serving your mentees this week.
This cohort
There are 25 peer mentors in the Semester 3 cohort, across three streams.
What this cohort wants
The first question on the survey asked how important it is to you to become a more effective peer mentor by the end of this semester. This is the one score in the guide where the answer is not a style but a commitment, and it is worth seeing what your cohort said.
Almost everyone rated it Important or Very important. That is a real starting condition: the room already wants this.
Why this one has no bands
Every other chapter shades the distribution into Low / Mid / High thirds. This one does not. Read this figure as a group portrait, not as a personal score.
Your stream
The mindsets in this guide are the same for everyone. Good mentoring looks much the same whether your team is running assays, analyzing health data, or building visualizations — the chapters ahead apply to all three streams without modification.
What differs is how your stream uses the guide. Streams set their own pace through the chapters, hold their peer mentor meetings at different times, and build the weekly reflection into their course in different ways. Your research educator decides which chapter you are working on in a given week, how the mindset is discussed when you meet, and where your journal entries go.
Your research educator will tell you which chapter to read each week, when your peer mentor meetings happen, and how to submit your journal entries.
Ask your research educator for details.
Reflect and Plan
Journal
- Purpose: What made a peer mentor helpful to you when you were the first-year student? Name something specific they did.
- Goal: You rated how important it is to become a more effective mentor. What would “more effective” actually look like for you by December?