2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

While engineering majors' low retention and graduation rates are still national problems in the U.S., peer mentoring and tutoring have proven to be one of the effective ways to engage students and improve retention and graduation rates. Engineering students enter college with certain expectations about engineering that hardly materialize in traditional curricula where students face gateway courses such as calculus, physics, and chemistry that are taught outside of engineering. An engaging peer mentoring and tutoring program for gateway courses in engineering education can help bridge this gap. Over the last four years at Texas A&M University-Kingsville, a collaborative approach has been used to create a strong connection and collaboration between faculty from the Colleges of Arts & Sciences and Engineering to facilitate an undergraduate peer mentoring and tutoring program intended to aid students in engineering gateway courses. While most literature focuses on the impacts on student mentees in peer mentoring and tutoring programs, the authors investigated the impacts on student peer mentors in an undergraduate peer mentoring and tutoring program. This paper analyzes the survey responses collected in the last four years from more than 30 peer mentors. Survey questions cover those peer mentors’ perspectives on the training they received regarding mentoring and tutoring skills, impacts on the mentees, and impacts on themselves. Different questions were asked under each area with a total of 23 questions in the survey. The results show that peer mentoring and tutoring activities have positive impacts on the student mentors in various domains.