At each Boise State home football game, the “Blue Turf Thinkers” series honors outstanding groups and initiatives on the world-renowned Blue Turf. The Sept. 19 game’s “Blue Turf Thinkers” featured student leaders from the Honors College’s Peer Mentor Program.
Starting college is a big adjustment for most students, and members of Boise State’s Honors College are no exception. Students are often nervous about navigating coursework, seeking out research and leadership opportunities, and feeling like they belong in their new community. To help ease the transition, the Honors College Peer Mentor Program connects first-year students with experienced upperclassmen who guide them through their first semester.
The program began in 2009 as a loosely structured experiment, matching a small group of student leaders with incoming students who wanted extra support. Since then, the program has grown significantly in size and scope. This year, 42 peer mentors have stepped up to support an incoming class of around 400 students.
Over the fall, peer mentors take on a substantial leadership role for the Honors College. They help run the Honors Welcome Program, a two-day orientation for new students that takes place before classes begin. Once the semester starts, they facilitate discussion sections for the introductory Honors 198 course, designing their own lesson plans under the guidance of Honors instructors and meeting every week with a small group of first-year students.
Becoming a peer mentor starts with an application process that includes individual and group interviews, allowing staff to evaluate how candidates lead, listen and work with others. Selected mentors then undertake training in curriculum design, classroom management, community building and how to recognize when a student may be struggling.
Peer mentors typically focus on three main areas of support: academic, social and personal. Academically, mentors help first-year students adjust to honors coursework and think ahead toward research, scholarship and other opportunities available to them. Socially, they introduce students to a cohort of peers, helping build a supportive community early on. And personally, mentors offer relatable guidance, normalizing the ups and downs of the first semester and pointing students toward campus wellness resources when needed.
Assistant Dean Chris Hyer, who leads the program with Assistant Director Madison Cunningham, points to the peer-to-peer connection as the reason it works. “We know that students are more comfortable approaching other students with concerns than they are approaching staff,” Hyer said. “When you can connect with someone who has gone through what you’re going through, it’s so much easier to ask questions.”
That comfort leads to more honest conversations, and it allows mentors to witness their mentees’ growth over the semester. It also shapes the mentors themselves.
As peer mentor Mae Hutchinson said, “The opportunity to facilitate a discussion section, build lessons, teach the class and foster a sense of community is not one that every student gets to experience, and I feel incredibly lucky to be a small part of such a thoughtfully run program. Madison and Chris have designed the program with peer mentors, new students, and faculty in mind, creating a community that is welcoming, fun, and structured for learning. I can confidently say that this position has solidified my love for teaching and education, something I may never have discovered otherwise.”
Experiences like Hutchinson’s aren’t unusual. Mentors gain confidence, leadership experience and communication skills that carry forward into their upper-division coursework and beyond. The reciprocal benefits of the program have drawn interest from honors colleges around the U.S. Over the years, the Boise State Honors College has frequently been asked to share its training materials and program structure with other institutions, some of which have since adopted versions of the model for their own students.
What started as an informal effort to help a few students adjust has become one of the foundational parts of the Honors College experience, one that shapes both the students who receive support and the peer mentors who give it.