Work in progress - implementing a freshman mentor program

Creating positive learning communities that engage incoming engineering students with varying degrees of engineering experience poses a challenge to universities with high numbers of enrolled students. Many schools have a general university-wide orientation program for every student. Other universities address only a distinct subset of students in their mentorship programs. Neither solution provides individual technical mentorship to the entire incoming class. In September 2006 a solution was started at OSU which was to implement a mentor program for the entire freshman class. Evaluation tools for the freshman mentor program consist of student retention rate records, a freshman mentor database, and a survey to track growth in our mentoring effectiveness within the student body. Future goals of the program will include: increasing student involvement with academic clubs, implementing novel structures to increase retention.