Life Algorithm

Mentoring for another year! February 24, 2011

I’ve been selected to be a CoC mentor for another year!!! 😀

The selection process was even more strict that last year’s – unfortunately the program had to be reduced to 25 mentors, yet the Office of Outreach, Enrollment, and Community got over 50 applications this year!

I spoke with a lot of the students that applied, and I’d estimate that roughly half of them were freshmen.  Although this makes sense since a lot of freshmen hang out near the OEC office and were told personally about the application (through OEC or their friends), it’s still kind of crazy that a group consisting of ~120 students – or 1/6th of the entire CoC – provided half the candidates.

Considering that the program has GPA and credit constraints (2.4ish GPA and 30+ credit hours), and that the application was rather lengthy, I’d say there was probably a significant amount of freshmen that wanted to apply but didn’t for various reasons.  Still, accounting only for those freshmen who did apply, that means that roughly 1 out of every 5 freshmen applied to be a mentor, about 10 times the application rate for other CoC students!

All in all, the most significant factor is that all the freshmen that applied (or wanted to) were all mentees in last year’s mentor program – and wanted to pay it forward by being mentors to future freshmen.  I’d say that makes last year’s program quite successful 🙂

As for myself and whether some of my mentees got into the program, all I’ll say is that the tree’s height has increased…