If you find your professor intimidating and don't want to lose face asking seemingly naive questions about a course or your research, to whom can you turn? A peer mentor might be the answer. Peer-mentoring schemes have been around since ancient times - they even get a mention in Greek texts - but today they are becoming increasingly popular in academic environments as educators begin to recognize the benefits for their students of learning with a little help from their friends.

Big Helping Is Helping

So what is peer mentoring, and what's in it for you? The system usually involves coupling older students with their younger peers to make, as one recent graduate, Joseph Branch, describes it, a "Big Brother/Big Sister" program. The system provides the younger students with better insights into their courses and how to get the most out of their time. Conversely, the peer mentors themselves learn valuable skills in handling people.

Numerous universities now run peer-mentoring programs in the United States and, increasingly, in Europe and the United Kingdom. These programs often come in different guises with various names. Peer-assisted learning (PAL) and paired learning are popular alternative names, although some advocates would argue they are not quite synonyms. "In peer-assisted learning, there is a deliberate intent to help another person or persons with their own learning goals," explains Keith Topping, an educational psychologist at the University of Dundee in Scotland. "Within this overarching principle, PAL includes a number of different methods: peer tutoring, peer mentoring, peer modeling, peer education, peer counseling, peer monitoring, and peer assessment." (The International Mentoring Association hosted by Western Michigan University provides a good starting point for finding out more details and background on the various methods.)

Under Obligation

If your faculty is already running such a program, then it is not such a big step to get involved. Indeed, you might be obliged to pair up with a peer mentor as part of your course structure. Faculty administrators will usually link a mentor and a younger student with common backgrounds in research, career interests, regional and ethnic backgrounds and, sometimes, gender. One of the most straightforward and functional peer mentor systems might not even rely on sharing a course or research group. Janice Baker of London Guildhall University "runs a buddy scheme for English-speaking students to help students using English as a second language to upgrade their written work."

Peer mentoring comes into its own in helping students develop their own skill sets and in dealing with their courses and research. Fellow students are, after all, uniquely qualified to empathize and inspire. While that intimidating professor in a white coat with the stereotypical wacky hair may not be entirely approachable for the most trivial of problems, a student colleague just a year or two further on might offer a friendlier face and help their "junior" colleague find their own solutions.

"It is a safe place to air understandings and misunderstandings - it is where students realize that everyone else is having the same problem with understanding that they are," explains Maureen Donelan of University College at London, which runs the Peer Assisted Learning program in the math, physics, and biochemistry departments. This is a task that no tutor can do. Tutors are often so far removed from the problems of student days that they can no longer empathize in the way that fellow students who have just been through the process can. "The students are often the ones who initiate peer mentoring because they find the faculty tending to give old and/or misleading information," adds Branch. "They were often looking out for themselves. How often would a person in aerospace engineering or history tell you the job market is tight?"

Graduate Approval

Emma Coe helped set up the Enterprise Centre Peer Mentoring program in science at the University of Manchester in England. "Most of our postgraduate peer mentoring is conducted by graduate students for graduate students," she explains. "The basic idea of peer mentoring is straightforward - experienced graduate students are assigned small groups of those less experienced." She adds that the students can turn to their mentor with all kinds of queries for getting hold of particular bits of information and for help, advice, and general support and encouragement. The mentors act more as guides than teachers. Indeed, some peer-mentoring schemes are set-up so that "teaching" is prohibited as it ultimately benefits neither party.

Both mentor and mentee can gain a lot from a peer-mentoring program. "Mentors experience leading a group, [and] learn facilitation techniques, teamwork, empathy and communication skills as well as valuable revision," explains Donelan. "Employers," she adds, "are very interested in these schemes, because students provide evidence of transferable skills obtained in an innovative way." It is often more difficult to encourage freshmen to join in because they often perceive the system as remedial, which it is not.

Careering Ahead

Peer mentoring can also help the younger students define their career goals, although there is generally no explicit component of the various systems for this aspect of personal development. "Through talking as a group and having mentors share experiences of their own goals and next steps," explains Coe, "students might discover some of the choices open to them." Career guidance, per se, usually comes under a separate umbrella. Just talking to other graduate students and mentors can be a helpful way of sounding out ideas, hearing of useful opportunities, or finding out about networks.

Traditional tutoring systems often fail because of staff shortages. A peer-mentoring program can help solve such problems by integrating new students into a university and its way of life. The mentors benefit from the added responsibility and the opportunity to put something back into the system without simply adding to the workloads of overburdened tutors and administrators. "The advantages of this are huge," says Donelan. "Students are a university's most underused resource, and have an immense amount to give, and when given the responsibility they rise to the challenge."

Often there is some kind of remuneration or course credit for mentors taking part in these programs. Topping says that in some programs, mentors can simply be interested volunteers or have the inducement of a course or other credit for tutoring. In the United States, he points out, it is more usual that senior student mentors would receive some payment. "But," he warns, "if you pay, you might not get the best-motivated helpers."

A department hoping to run a peer-mentoring scheme should offer workshops within the program to assist both mentors and their "charges." Mentors can learn about their role and what a student might expect, how to communicate effectively, and how to maintain the relationship. In the Peer-Led Team Learning Workshop Model at the City University of New York (CUNY), students who have done well in their classes become guides and mentors to small groups of between six and eight fellow students. This occurs at the undergraduate level, and peer mentors here are actually within the same year group. The peer-led groups meet weekly and work on carefully structured problems. The supportive environment provided by this arrangement helps each student build his or her understanding of science.

There are several key components of the CUNY system that are equally applicable to a mentoring scheme anywhere: the workshops become a regular course component, the faculty teaching the course are heavily involved from the sidelines, and peer mentors undergo training under close supervision. Everyone benefits from particular attention being paid to mentor knowledge and teaching and learning techniques.

The lack of a peer-mentoring scheme in your department or faculty might present an opportunity to be proactive. The easiest and most obvious tack might be to approach your student society and see whether it might be possible to implement an informal "buddying" scheme for new research students. Such a scheme could be initiated easily at the usual freshmen social or orientation events.

Alternative to Tradition

Traditional mentors do not always provide the best learning "assistants" for young research students. "I would never knock the personal tutoring system," emphasizes Donelan, "which I think is also vital, but which plays a different role - in loco parentis, whereas the fellow student is a role model." Structured peer mentoring at the graduate student level is relatively new, but is breaking with tradition, and comments from postgraduates underscore how valuable it can be. "I met people I wouldn't normally come into contact with and also had someone to turn to for advice," said one Manchester University scientist. Others mention "encouragement," "reassurance that it is common not to get many results in the first year," "gaining advice on seminar presentations," and "introductions to people in the department" as important to their experience of peer mentoring.

Rather than finding yourself the junior partner in a long-term "tutor-student" relationship, you might request that your supervisor or department set you up with a peer mentor. If such a program does not yet exist at your institution, it might be worth bringing the idea to the attention of your supervisor or asking an older student to do that for you.

A friend could soon mentor you.