Mentoring program for students newly enrolled in an Engineering Degree

Abstract

This work presents a mentoring program for first year engineering students in the Telecommunications Engineering College (ETSIT) at the University of Malaga (UMA). Actors involved in the program are professors from staff, veterans mentoring students and, of course, freshmen. All of them has been organized trough the Moodle based Virtual Learning Environment Platform of the UMA. The program has gone through several phases over three years. This paper shows the main objectives of this mentoring program, the initial design to get them where professors played mentor role, and successive changes made to try to improve the results, including the assumption of the mentor role by senior students (peer mentoring). The tools used for program evaluation are shown too. Despite the low participation, it has been a framework for the development of various educational and socializing activities (for mentors and mentees) focused on developing generic competences. Furthermore, it has been a research tool to get a better understanding of problems affecting students newly enrolled.