anyway bragging. so the volunteer thing i do, i’ve maybe mentioned before, is for high school & college students, selected on various axes including being underrepresented in science, to do a summer cancer research project in a lab on my campus; and my role is to act as a peer mentor, meaning for ~¼th of the students i’m their most direct contact on the program side/a general reference person for issues w their research, or anything even vaguely associated such as college apps etc, incl after the program ends if they want to stay in contact/most specifically there to help them learn to present, publicly, about science. i also was in this program the summer before i started college, and my peer mentor was useless– i saw him once, got like two emails, received functionally no support. (he is no longer a volunteer). since then i’ve been a mentor every year so this will be my third.

and anyway, i was at the start-of-program meeting, and we were discussing the role/expectations for volunteers for the new people, and the longest-running volunteer, who started the year before i was even a student in the program, said that last summer he had shifted from emailing his group of students once every week or two to check in as he’d been doing in years previous, to instead having lunch with them weekly. and that they had had dramatically increased engagement/attendance/had been more likely to come to him with their issues in the program, and done it sooner, than when he’d just been contacting them by email.

and the thing is that, as he actually mentioned in passing, i’m the one who started doing that– bc of the time commitment involved, weekly meetings were never pitched to us as an expectation of the role or even really suggested as a way of doing it; i introduced that, in my first year mentoring, because i remembered how hard a time i had not being engaged/comfortable bringing up my problems in my lab in the program, and wanted to be way more hands-on and more of a resource for my students than the suggested level of contact seemed to involve. so: i, an at the time 19-y/o w no formal teaching or mentoring experience, tried a thing, it worked well, and the highly-experienced late-stage grad student picked it up from me the next year, and now has decided to continue with it and recommend it to the organizers & other volunteers as the best way to do things.

i feel so good about that! i feel so good about that. i am not only above-and-beyond engaged/committed to this thing i care about, but i figured out a better way to make it work, and now other people in the program are also doing it so that it can succeed more and be more helpful overall. what an uncomplicatedly good thing!