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This is a repost of Mentor Collective's 2022 Partner Appreciation Week Celebration
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 celebrate Mentor Collective 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 whose collaboration and forward-thinking ensure these programs are adopted and supported across their student and campus communities.
Here is a message from Jackson Boyar, CEO, and Co-Founder, of Mentor Collective.
Celebrating Darren Ward of University of Wisconsin - Stout
We're excited to present this insightful interview between Alexandria Glaize, Head of Partner Marketing, Mentor Collective, and Darren Ward, Associate Director of Transfer and Articulation, University of Wisconsin-Stout.
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
- First-Year Student Challenges
- Building Community and Encouraging Engagement
- Impact on Retention
- Campus Collaboration
- Leveraging Insights For Real-Time Support
We’re pleased to highlight Darren Ward as an honoree for Mentor Collective’s Partner Appreciation Week.
When this interview was given, Darren was serving as Interim Director of the Advisement Center, counseling students within the Supply Chain Management and Packaging degree programs as they transition to college, develop academic skills, and plan for future semesters at UW-Stout. In January 2023, Darren shifted to the admissions office and currently serves as the Associate Director of Admissions for Transfer and Articulation.
Darren earned his dual Bachelor of Science degrees in Economics and Business Administration from UW-River Falls in 2015 and a Master’s degree in Student Affairs Administration from UW-La Crosse in 2017.
About MentorLink, University of Wisconsin-Stout Mentorship Program
MentorLink is a first-year peer-to-peer mentorship program through Mentor Collective that uses a highly responsive platform to design, manage, and analyze large-scale mentorship programs. The University of Wisconsin-Stout developed its program with its Mentor Collective mentorship team to focus on supporting incoming undergraduate students.
First-Year Student Challenges
Alexandria: What challenges are your first-year students facing? And what interested you in investing in large-scale mentorship to meet those challenges and support first-year first-time students?
Darren: We first invested in mentorship to provide students with an extra layer of support.
We value partnering with Mentor Collective because we offer MentorLink to all incoming first-year students and provide mentoring matches pre-arrival. Students are matched with a mentor before they arrive on campus for their first fall semester. That helps them get those questions they might need answered over the summer. They’re also connected with another student in the form of an upper-class mentor before they arrive on campus.
Initially, MentorLink was intended to provide students with additional support through peer mentorship. However, since the pandemic, there are additional layers of why we invested in mentorship: it helps make a connection and foster a sense of belonging for many students in both mentor and mentee roles.
Campus Collaboration
Alexandria: How do you identify potential collaborators across campus? And how important is connecting with other campus leaders to support the mentorship program?
Darren: We’ve leveraged campus collaborations to help solve challenges such as mentor recruitment and increased program visibility. For example, I strategically reach out to leaders who know students who might be good mentors, i.e., orientation leaders or program directors.
One new tactic we tried this Fall (because we still needed more mentors) was hosting a tabling event in our student center. It helped put our program in front of our faculty, students, and those working here at Stout. As a result, I had 5 or 6 impactful conversations about the mentorship program with different campus leaders. And in turn, they promoted the mentorship program.
Given our success, I plan to continue to promote the program through tabling and other. I also plan to do more outreach to our students as we go through the spring semester and engage mentors for next year's program, such as hosting a town hall.
Impact on Retention
Alexandria: Your analysis found that first-time students who participated in the mentoring program saw a higher retention rate and were more likely to remain in good academic standing than those who weren't a part of the mentoring program. How has what you learned from MentorLink influenced your overall student success strategy?
Darren: Our data has shown that the MentorLink program has been impactful since it began at Stout in 2018 Students who participate in the program are more likely to be retained from Fall to Spring. Our fall-to-spring persistence numbers have been very good. Fall to Spring for 2020-2021 was 88%, and the most recent numbers for 2021-2022 persistent rate is 91%.
We also saw an increase in the number of students who remained in good academic standing, versus probation or dismissal, for those involved in the mentorship program. Students in the program remain in good academic standing at a higher rate than those not part of the program.
We could further explore how student insights could drive our overall retention strategy, but instead, we leveraged the program's success to drive increased campus collaboration. When we needed buy-in to grow MentorLink to provide mentorship to all first-year students, I leveraged the data showing the positive impact [mentorship had] on retention.
Building Community and Encouraging Engagement
Alexandria: How are you building community and encouraging engagement between mentors and mentees?
Darren: One way that we have increased mentor engagement is through sending a monthly email, The MentorLink Monthly. The goal of the outreach is to encourage our mentors to keep up the excellent work. The newsletter highlights total conversations, uplifts discussion guides, and proposes conversation topics. It serves as an opportunity to make the experience more specific to our campus, so mentors get Stout-specific resources from a Stout employee they can reach out to. It helps keep them engaged. It brings to light, “Oh, I’m a mentor in this program; I should reach out to my mentees.” Once the email is sent, we often see a spike in conversations.
Leveraging Insights For Real-Time Support
Alexandria: How has the data from your mentorship program helped identify potential barriers to persistence?
Darren: It has been helpful to see: (1) students connecting with their mentors and (2) insights from non-priority flags. At times, those can be helpful, and we even pass them on to our advising team and say, “Here’s a student that's one of your advisees; here's what their mentor has observed. Maybe this is something to provide context as you’re having conversations with students.”
Our retention and persistence rates from fall to spring are pretty high, but that drops off slightly when looking at retention rates from fall to fall. To help boost fall-to-fall retention, I plan to host a spring event where we invite the mentoring pairs to a basketball game and pizza. So really low touch, but a way to hopefully keep that engagement more consistent throughout the spring semester.
Alexandria: What do you hope is a student’s experience through this program?
Darren: My hope for a student in this program is that they will find a connection with their mentor that will help them find their fit at UW-Stout. When using MapWorks in the past we found a direct correlation to retention when a student answered yes to questions like (1) Somebody at Stout cares for me, (2) Stout cares about me.
Alexandria: Why do you champion mentorship?
Darren: Two reasons why I continue to be engaged in this program and why I continue to be excited about MC are:
- Mentorship has been so impactful in my college experience. I ended up in higher education because of a mentor.
- With a partnership with someone like MC, the impact and efficiency of the mentorship program are possible, especially when it comes to recruiting mentors, recruiting mentees, sending out emails, etc. Our most significant program was from 2018-2019, right before the pandemic, and we had over 800 students in our program. We needed a partnership to run that program. That's why I champion mentorship and selected to use MC as a partner in this program.
Alexandria: Wow, thank you; all of this was great! I always feel excited after connecting with Partners and appreciate you always taking it back to the student experience.
If you liked this blog, take a look at other interviews from Mentor Collective’s 2022 Partner Appreciation Week!
Please note these interviews were given in November 2022. Since the initial publish date of this blog post, our honorees may have changed roles or moved on to other careers or institutions. We continue to highlight their work despite organizational changes because of their thought leadership and dedication to improving the student experience.