Cross-Level Peer Mentoring

With increasing demand for engineering education in India, universities and colleges are finding it increasingly difficult to build enough faculty capacity to provide a long term individual attention to all students. A few hours of weekly engagement of senior students in mentoring junior students can greatly supplement faculty efforts to enhance the technical competence of a much larger number of junior students. This paper describes our experiment with cross peer mentoring for the last six years, and makes a case for introducing it as a conscious student teaching/learning strategy in the engineering curricula across the country. The paper also argues that cross-level curricular peer mentoring has multi-dimensional effects on mentees as well as mentors. Instead of viewing it as a strategy to partially overcome faculty shortage for junior level courses, it should be viewed as a necessary educational experience for seniors that helps them enhance several of their own competencies. Two appendixes present: (1) Advantages of Mentoring as Identified by Final Year Students Involved in Crosslevel Mentoring of Juniors, 2009; and (2) Advantages of Mentoring as Identified by Alumni.