Student Peer Mentors Present at Statewide Conference

Over the summer, two student peer mentors in the School of Business presented at the Student Success Summit, a statewide conference for educators co-sponsored by the West Virginia Department of Education and the West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission.

At the conference, Dr. Richard Harvey, Dean of the School of Business, briefly introduced the peer mentoring program that has been implemented by the School of Business through the Title III Strengthening Institutions grant, and then he turned the presentation over to Fairmont State students Alex Campbell and Effy Kim. Both Campbell and Kim have served as peer mentors since the program began last fall.

Campbell, who is majoring in Accounting, and Kim, who is majoring Information Systems Management, prepared the presentation and were excited about the opportunity to present at a professional conference. The students presented to a crowd of education professionals and fielded a number of questions.

“The audience was very interested in our presentation,” Kim said. “A lot of professors and educators were curious how the program fared at Fairmont State, and they also had a lot of questions related to ethics.”

 “The experience of presenting was marvelous,” Campbell said. “I worked hard enough preparing that I knew for certain that the end product would turn out well. And, while presenting, it was easy to see the listeners engaging. We received great feedback from multiple people. I also had some good conversations about peer mentoring and other teaching concepts with various people afterwards.” 

Kim was pleased not only to have an opportunity to present at the conference but also to attend.

“This [conference] was a great opportunity to learn more about higher education and to broaden my horizon,” she said. “I believe this experience opened my eyes to new opportunities in the education field.”  

Peer mentoring is an important initiative of the Title III Strengthening Institutions grant project at Fairmont State. Both the School of Business and the College of Science & Technology are piloting peer mentoring programs funded through the Title III grant.

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