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Mentor Collective has the best partners in Higher Education.
Mentor Collective partners are forward-thinking leaders and innovators committed to increasing access to and delivering the promise of higher education for ALL students.
So it’s no wonder they advocate for the high-impact student success practice of mentorship at pivotal moments in the student journey. Our partners’ collaboration and passion help us deliver on our shared promise of empowering all people to realize their full potential.
We are exceptionally proud to share our 190 partners have formed nearly 245,000 mentoring relationships between students and trained, relevant mentors.
As we enter Mentor Collective’s first Partner Appreciation Week, we want to say “thank you” to our impact-first partner community. In addition, we want to uplift the fantastic work of a few of our partners who manage their mentorship programs daily.
A message from Jackson Boyar, CEO, and Co-Founder, of Mentor Collective.
Introducing Brianne Neptin
We're excited to present this insightful interview between Alexandria Glaize, Head of Partner Marketing, Mentor Collective, and Brianne Neptin, Experiential Education Coordinator (Arts & Sciences), Center for Career & Experiential Education, University of Rhode Island.
Don’t have time to read the full interview? Use the links in the table of contents below to read the highlights you care about.
Table of Contents
Fostering A Sense of Belonging
Supporting Historically Underrepresented Students
Building Community and Encouraging Engagement
Why Mentorship? Why Mentor Collective?
Brianne Neptin is a Master’s student and an Experiential Education Coordinator for the College of Arts & Sciences in URI’s Center for Career and Experiential Education, working on expanding and increasing student experiential learning opportunities. She holds a B.S. in Environmental Economics and Management, an M.S. in College Student Personnel from URI, and an M.S. in Agricultural Economics from the University of Connecticut.
From 2005 to 2007, she served as a Peace Corps Volunteer focusing on agribusiness in Moldova. Upon arrival back in the States, she returned to URI as the Coastal and Environmental Fellowship Program coordinator in the College of the Environment and Life Sciences.
About the University of Rhode Island Arts & Sciences Peer Mentoring Program
University of Rhode Island Arts & Sciences launched its first-year experience peer-to-peer mentorship program through Mentor Collective, which uses a highly responsive platform to design, manage and analyze large-scale mentorship programs. The University of Rhode Island College of Arts & Sciences designed its program to increase a sense of belonging and retention for first-year students, specifically for historically underrepresented and STEM learners.
Fostering A Sense of Belonging
Alexandria: What challenges are your first-year students facing? What interested you in investing in large-scale mentorship to meet those challenges and support first-year first-time students?
Brianne: How do you build community? How do you find your place at the University of Rhode Island campus? It's more complex than showing up and finding your people. We wanted to provide an additional layer of support for students to learn what it means to be college students and navigate their first year.
Even more so, we’re coming out of a pandemic. We knew going into this academic year that students would have a lot of very different experiences that we had never experienced before. We can't help them if we don't know what's happening. We knew we had a need, and therefore we had this desire to develop a way to give what we hope is an ability for our students to be successful right out of the jump.
We have other mentoring initiatives. In our URI 101 course, a Student Teacher Assistant is assigned to mentor 25 students. You don’t know if they’re going to connect. It doesn't have the level of strategic matching and assessment based on similarities, interests, and goals. We needed a way to navigate our students' diverse post-pandemic experiences, so peer-to-peer mentoring allows our first-year students to have someone they felt was for them.
Supporting Historically Underrepresented Students
Alexandria: You leverage peer-to-peer mentorship to support historically underrepresented students and STEM learners specifically. Why was mentorship the solution to support these specific demographic students, and what do you hope their student experience will be?
Brianne: We can't escape the reality that we are a primarily white institution. For the most part, our demographics match a similar demographic within the state, but that means our students from underrepresented communities—such as those of color, descending from a lower socioeconomic class or part of the LGBTQ+ community. It’s not easy finding your place.
You're going to have students stand there and say, “No one in my classroom looks like me,” or “No one in my dorm has the same physical hygiene needs.” I can't all support students unless I understand their unique needs and challenges. They may not tell me what those are because I often do not represent how they see themselves. And as much as I would like to believe that’s not the reality, it is the reality; that's just the way it is. So we needed to find ways to uncover challenges and help students navigate their first year at URI.
Mentor Collective allows students to identify the best person to mentor them through the matching survey. We want students to feel empowered. We hope that students find something that is meant to allow them to build community and find their people. We have to do that.
Building Community and Encouraging Engagement
Alexandria: 42% of your mentorships had logged at least three conversations, which means the mentoring pair is highly engaged and active. How are you building community and encouraging consistent engagement and activity?
Brianne: We started with parents. During the first-year student orientation, Jeannette Riley, Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, shared the importance and advantages of the program with parents. We then encouraged parents to share with students. Dean Riley also highlighted the program's value when students first came on campus during an event. The event was meant to drive home the parts of the University that would make first-year students successful. She made sure Mentor Collective and the mentorship program were part of that. So, students have known from the beginning that this is for them. The mentoring program is crucial to becoming part of the URI community.
Brianne: For mentee engagement, we leveraged the Mentor Collective system to let students know about the event. To ensure mentees feel supported, we are using the Flags to help determine what resources students need. We built a mentoring page on our university's website to tailor our resources to address their unique needs. I am finding ways to ensure resources are in various places to help drive impact.
For mentor engagement, we created merch bags for the mentors to ensure they understand they are appreciated. We know that they are taking on this extra responsibility on top of their day-to-day activities. We are leveraging our resources to ensure they know we see them. Also, I try to give feedback to the mentors when they send up a Flag. I make sure that I reach back out to them. Sometimes it’s something simple like “Thanks for lettings us know; we appreciate you as a mentor.” Sometimes it's a follow-up to be like I need more details. But often, it’s just the reinforcement that they're doing a good job.
Alexandria: What have you learned thus far that surprised you?
Brianne: How active the mentoring pairs are. It's a dozen or two dozen conversations daily. We hit our 200-student cap in a week and are almost at our second cap of 400. We're meeting a need that I didn't realize was necessary. That’s how crucial a sense of belonging and connection is.
Why Mentorship? Why Mentor Collective?
Alexandria: Why do you champion mentorship?
Brianne: I have always found mentorship to be extraordinarily beneficial. Before I took on this particular role, I ran an undergraduate research fellowship program. In this program, undergraduate researchers were matched with faculty researchers so that the undergrads could get experience with hands-on projects.
Even before Dean Riley shared we were going to partner with Mentor Collective, I had seen these students learning so much and so unbelievably successful in the opportunities they're given when they are allowed the space to shine and have a mentor.
When mentoring is done thoughtfully and provides a space for students to grow and find what they need, that’s when the magic happens. It’s about figuring out their space. Whether that is something career-minded such as a research fellowship, or something more simple, like coming onto campus to find community and a leader who is farther along in the process, they’re simply being shown a path. They don’t have to take it, but if it suits them, maybe they’ll figure something out that’s beneficial to their long-term growth. Mentoring at all levels allows students to grow and figure out their next steps along the way with someone by their side.
Don't miss the next partner highlight during Mentor Collective’s Partner Appreciation Week! Features include Darren Ward from the University of Wisconsin-Stout, Tiffani Williams from Tuskegee University, and Nonzenzele Aldonza from California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.