AirUCI students to pilot "near peer" mentoring program

A group of AirUCI graduate students are piloting a "near peer" mentoring program as part of their broader impacts requirement for a joint NSF project with Reed College in Portland, Oregon.  Our graduate student mentors are paired with Reed chemistry undergrads who want to learn more about graduate school.  Reed is a primarily undergraduate institution (PUI) with a high percentage of students who ultimately move on to pursue graduate degrees but, as it's a small PUI, many students have limited exposure to the details of life as a grad student.

For this pilot, there are nine Reed students who have expressed interest in learning more about graduate studies in chemistry, and we have nine graduate students from AirUCI.  Each graduate/undergraduate pair will be in touch as needed/desired, and every 2 or 3 weeks they will "meet" as a full group via video conferencing to talk about some topic (e.g. life in grad school or professional development).  In August, we will fly the Reed students to UCI for a couple of days for in-person meetings and lab tours.
 
The first full-group video meeting will be held on Friday, March 22nd, and the participating AirUCI students are Sabrina Chee, Amy Christiansen, Danielle Draper, Hayley Glicker, Alicia Hoffman, Bryan Hwang, Alex Jarnot, Alexandra Klodt, and Deanna Myers.