Impact of Peer Mentoring on Undergraduate Student Mentees and Their Peer-Mentors in Both the Near and Long Term

The Partnership for Retention Improvement in Math, Engineering, and Science (PRIMES) is an NSF STEP program implemented across 8 different departments in 3 different schools (Engineering, Education, and Arts and Sciences) at the University of Louisville. The cornerstone of this program is the development of learning communities and supplemental instruction teams based on the Colorado Learning Assistant model to support several of the foundation courses for each of the participating departments. In Chemical Engineering, these courses include Introduction to Chemical Engineering, Introduction to Materials Science and Material and Energy Balances. In the 5 years of the programs existence, there have been over 50 Chemical Engineering peer-mentors who have impacted hundreds of undergraduate students. In this talk we will discuss the impact of the PRIMES program on both the mentors and their mentees in terms of both classroom performance as well as longer term impacts as they matriculate through the program and into the job market.