Abstract
Peer mentoring programs are typically designed to support students transitioning into university. However, recent work has highlighted the importance of supporting transitions through and out of university. The Australian psychology honours year is a particularly stressful period that involves transitioning through university into the research environment and is soon followed by transitions into the workforce or postgraduate study. The School of Psychology at the University of New South Wales, Australia (UNSW) recently developed a graduate/honours peer mentoring program. Pairs of PhD students mentor small groups of honours students in monthly meetings, discussing various aspects of honours and career options. Most honours students sign up for mentoring and evaluation results show that mentees find the program helpful, most frequently acknowledging that their mentors helped them with general advice and understanding their career options. Peer mentoring can therefore support psychology student transitions through and out of university.
Highlights
Peer mentoring programs to facilitate the transition into the first year of university are widespread and have been used for many years in psychology (Chester, Burton, Xenos, & Elgar, 2013; Huon & Sankey, 2000), and numerous other disciplines (Collings, Swanson, & Watkins, 2014; Yomtov, Plunkett, Efrat, & Marin, 2017)
These results suggest that peer mentoring may be a useful intervention for psychology honours students
We developed a peer mentoring program where pairs of graduate students provide small-group mentoring to psychology honours students
Summary
Peer mentoring programs to facilitate the transition into the first year of university are widespread and have been used for many years in psychology (Chester, Burton, Xenos, & Elgar, 2013; Huon & Sankey, 2000), and numerous other disciplines (Collings, Swanson, & Watkins, 2014; Yomtov, Plunkett, Efrat, & Marin, 2017). In addition to providing benefits for the transition into undergraduate studies, recent work has emphasised the way that peer mentoring programs can facilitate the transition out of university by developing skills as students prepare to graduate (Xenos, Chester, & Burton, 2013). The most common issue honours students identify is a lack of control over academic outcomes (Cruwys et al, 2015) These workshops aimed to provide tips on and strategies for time management in a research environment, as studies have shown that even a short session of time management training can reduce students’ perceived stress and increase their perceived control of time (Häfner, Stock, & Oberst, 2015). Psychology practitioner masters options were discussed and mentees were given an opportunity to ask questions of a current masters student (or a student in a different masters program to their mentors). Mentees who responded ‘other’ wrote that their mentors helped them to take a break from stress to chat and gave time management advice
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