Physics & Astronomy Graduate Students (PAGS)

Mentor Program

We've recently started a mentoring program that matches first year grad students with older and "wiser" grad students (not too wise as they are still grad students).  We try to match people with similar backgrounds and research interests.  The prime motivation is to help incoming students when they first arrive at Hopkins by giving them a fellow student's perspective on which classes to take, how to study for the prelims, finding places to eat, tricks to teaching, and more.

Although mentors for the incoming fall 2008 class have been found, if you are interested in becoming a mentor we will be looking for mentors for the fall 2009 class next summer.  We hope to match everyone by native language and rough field of study; matching by gender would also be nice which we will try to do if we can.  If you already know someone in the incoming group feel free to mention that.  This should be a fairly low key thing to do and your advisor will not drop you because you talked to another grad student for a few minutes a few times.  This should be rewarding to you and possible very useful to them.

We are looking for people who have completed most of the course requirements and have settled into a research group.  The concept is just to make sure every first year has someone they can ask about course requirements, looking into people to work for, who not to take classes with, what are the real prereqs for a course, teaching problems, or whatever comes up.  This would be a one year commitment and can't promise any benefits.  On the other hand, it should not be hard and hopefully will be rewarding.  How much work it will be will depends mostly on you and your mentoree but typically (as a mentor volunteer) should involve something like meeting for some occasional lunches to see how things are going (but that would be between you and your mentoree).  Formally we will try to schedule a meeting between the mentors and mentorees sometime after they arrive to introduce everyone in person.  This program should both help the incoming students but also foster interaction between the senior and new grad students.