What I have learned...that I wish I had known before!

Happy Friday, Academic Mentors! 

We had the Lead Academic Mentors, who facilitate Peer Learning groups, brainstorm answers to the following question:

"What have you learned as lead AM that you wish you would have known as academic mentor?"
 
Below are four great responses. Let us know what you think in the comment section of this post! Stay tuned next week, where we will share three more of their answers.

1) As a lead academic mentor, I've learned how to be better at making my students more accountable for their work. As an academic mentor, I think I was a little scared to encourage my students to spend a lot of time preparing for our one-on-one sessions. As a lead AM, however, I have learned that students are usually thankful in the end when you give them "assignments" or encourage them to use study strategies that we talk about in our sessions. Being able to delegate tasks to students outside of the session makes our time in the session even more productive! -Anna, Chemistry

2) One thing I wish I had known as an academic mentor is that I was in a position to help students with more than just the class for which I was tutoring them. I tend to have at least a couple prospective psychology majors in peer learning each semester, and I usually set apart some time to give them advice on picking classes, things they might want to do for extracurriculars, etc. Even in related majors, as an upperclassman I've been able to help students out a lot with that type of thing, as well as time management, studying locations, where to look for internships, etc. Unfortunately it's not something I did as much as an academic mentor, even though I worked with a couple students who were prospective psychology or neurobiology majors. -Ryan, Psychology

3) One thing I've learned as a lead is that everyone learns differently and trying to cater to those differences takes a lot of work. As an academic mentor I only ever dealt with students one at a time, so differences in learning styles were not as easily distinguished as in the group setting. Learning this has helped me to be more flexible and make my plans adaptable. It also definitely helped me to see how hard teachers and professors have to work and I give them so much more credit now that I've sort of stepped in their shoes. -Kelsey, Math

4) As a lead academic mentor, I've learned how to better prepare for my sessions with activities for my students to do during the sessions. I think it was easy with one-on-one mentoring to get carried away and act more like a tutor by going through and teaching the material to the students and giving advice. As a lead, I have found it more effective and fun for the students if they participate in an activity that engages them and forces them to think and apply the material themselves. Although I have found this method extremely beneficial for group settings since it adds an element of competition and overall more engagement and enthusiasm, I think coming up with simple quizzes, flashcards, and/or a game with matching for basic terms can benefit in one-on-one settings as well. -Alex, Biology

Have a great weekend!
~CAE Academic Mentoring