The mentor system was the runaway success of orientation week — over 90 percent of new students rated it useful. Now its two coordinators, seniors Sana Iqbal and Petr Duda, are pitching the council on a year-round version pairing every first-year with a trained senior through their whole first year. We sat down with both. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
MU Student News: The orientation version worked. Why change it?
Iqbal: Because it ends. We build a hundred useful relationships in week one and then officially pretend they’re finished. The questions first-years actually struggle with — subject choices, first bad grade, first friendship problem — arrive in week six, week ten, February. The mentor from week one is exactly the right person, and by then the structure has evaporated.
Duda: The data point that convinced us: half of orientation mentors told us their mentees still message them. It’s already a year-round program. It’s just unpaid, untrained and invisible.
What does the year-round version look like?
Duda: Deliberately light. One required check-in a month — a conversation, not a form. Mentors get a half-day of training: what to listen for, what’s theirs to handle, and crucially what isn’t — when the right move is walking someone to the advising office. And mentors get a named staff contact, so they’re never holding something alone.
The obvious objection: seniors are the busiest students in the building.
Iqbal: It’s the objection we take most seriously, and the design answer is caps. Two mentees maximum, one scheduled hour a month, service credit for it, and an explicit off-ramp each term — no guilt, hand your mentees to the pool. A mentorship program that burns out its mentors teaches first-years exactly the wrong lesson about asking for help.
What did you steal from other schools?
Duda: The training half-day is borrowed from the peer tutoring launch — same principle, that goodwill without preparation curdles. The matching survey came from a school at the leadership conference: match on interests, but also on schedule overlap, which nobody thinks of and which decides everything.
Where does it stand with the council?
Iqbal: The proposal is written and costs almost nothing — training materials and a coordinator handover document, because we graduate in June. If the council approves this term, matching starts with next year’s first-years, run by people we’re recruiting now. The program outlasting us is the whole test. We wrote the handover document first, before the pitch. We learned that at the conference too.
