A Novel Near-Peer Mentoring Model Involving Doctoral Students in an Interdisciplinary Client-Facing Project-Based Learning Course

In our Innovative-Practice Full Paper, we introduce a novel near-peer mentoring model that involves doctoral students for mentoring in a client-facing project-based learning (PBL) course involving teams of students working on interdisciplinary projects. Mentoring forms the backbone for any PBL framework and an increase in enrollment necessitates the mentoring of a growing number of teams for instructors. We introduced a competitive mentoring fellowship program that seeks applications from doctoral students for mentoring project teams and awards fellowships to the selected applicants. Every team in the course is assigned a dedicated fellow from the program as a mentor who provides mentoring to the team in addition to the instructors throughout an entire semester. The program is also designed to help doctoral students gain valuable experience mentoring a project end-to-end. Being an interdisciplinary course, we seek applications for mentoring from several departments across the university and evaluate the applications based on the expertise and knowledge of the applying doctoral students in a variety of relevant fields. To date, we have had 32 mentors in the program from five departments across the university. The selected fellows are tasked not only with mentoring their respective teams but also with attending meetings with the clients sponsoring the projects and understanding the needs of the clients for successfully completing the project. These responsibilities additionally provide the near-peer mentors with the experience of interacting with a client for the best possible outcome from the project. Evaluation of the program is done through separate surveys for enrolled students in the course (mentees) and the fellows (near-peer mentors) in the program. Results from our evaluation indicate that enrolled students appreciate the additional mentoring provided by the fellows while the fellows rate the program highly because of the experience they gain and the professional skills, such as team management, project management, and leadership skills, that they develop. We discuss strategies for improving the program in the future based on the recommendations of both the mentors and the mentees. Additionally, we discuss the instructor's perspective on designing and offering the program, which has benefits for instructors and departments as well.