All interviews were transcribed by a third party, and they were coded using Tesch’s eight steps for coding qualitative data. Phone interviews were conducted by a researcher outside of the program, and the identities of these eight students were not shared with this researcher. The program coordinator emailed these twenty mentors and eight agreed to be interviewed.

Many of these mentors had graduated and worked in various engineering positions, while others were current students. A random number generator was used to select twenty people from a list of all mentors who served at least two years in the program (n=101) since its inception in 2007. Intrigued by higher graduation rates of former peer mentors, the researchers sought to discover and examine the academic and social benefits peer mentors found by participating in this program. Over several years, it became apparent that the mentoring program had quite a positive effect on the mentors themselves as well as the protégés. With the increase of leadership and peer mentoring programs across universities, it’s important to examine all aspects and impacts of these programs on all students served. Past research mostly focuses on the effects of mentoring programs on the protégés–those who benefit from being mentored. This practice paper will present the findings of qualitative assessment conducted on undergraduate participants in a peer mentoring program in the College of Engineering at a large public university.

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