New College Colleagues program provides students with peer support

BY KARINA RAJTAR
Editor in Chief

New students at Saint Mary’s University now have a new level of support available to them: student support.

College Colleagues, a program that pairs new students with student “mentors,” is already seeing student interest, according to Chris Kendall, vice president for student development. Kendall said 10 matches have already been made, and 45 students and 25 staff and faculty members attended an informational meeting about becoming a College Colleague.

“I would hope that it would just be a common thing,” Kendall said. Kendall said his vision for the group is for students to learn more about the program next semester, and he said he ambitiously hopes that next fall every first year student will have a College Colleague to help transition into life at SMU. “I think it’s Lasallian,” Kendall said. He said the program is a way to serve closer to home, and the program is all about students supporting students. Kendall said the peer-to-peer relationship is good, especially when there can be a gap in skipping a generation between advisors and staff and the students. Students will be matched by common denominators such as hometown, major or hobbies, using the same kind of information currently used to match roommates, Kendall said. If the matching does not work, students can be re-matched.

One thing Kendall was surprised by in the process of starting the program is that students seem to think of the word “mentor” as a bad thing.

“The first thing I thought of was Yoda and Luke Skywalker in Star Wars,” Kendall said. He hopes to include some education around the word “mentor” as part of the program because he believes a mentor is a good thing.

Besides this education and the individual activities pairs can come up with, College Colleagues will also host activities for those in the program. Kendall said there will be movies with mentor relationships as a theme, an identity workshop and a year-end celebration. Kendall said those in the program will also receive t-shirts, and College Colleagues will go on participants’ co-curricular transcripts. Students interested in mentoring or being paired with a mentor, or anyone with ideas for the program, should contact Kendall at ckendall@smumn.edu.