image: Undergraduate annual fund student leaders: (l to r -- back row) Gaurav Kamat, Felix Majewski, Lucas Kerr, and Priyanka Raghavan; (l to r -- front row) Jesse Orozco, Ashley Nensel, Sun Hajela, Pearl Lee, Sophia Weng, and Robert Anderson
Exciting things happen every day in the undergraduate programs at the College of Chemistry including classes, guest lectures, student activities and more. Coupled with that, the undergrads use the Peer Advising and Tutoring programs and can get career counseling from our onsite career specialist.
But there’s another side to being an undergraduate, namely figuring out what your path will be after you leave school. This can be complicated according to Lucas Kerr (B.S. ’19, Chem). “For our aspiring students with bright futures, it is often difficult to make the next step in choosing their career.”
Jesse Orozco (B.S. ’20, ChemE) agrees, “It can be stressful to know what to do after graduation. There are many opportunities; do you go into industry, on to graduate school, or take a year off and travel?”
Thanks to our College alumni, the College added a new peer tutoring center this year and hired a part time career counselor last year. Now, our undergraduate students want to enhance the student experience adding a peer mentorship and alumni advising program.
The campaign goals for this initiative are:
- Expand the role of the current Peer Advisors to include tailored peer-to-peer student mentorships that 1) match upper classmen with lower classmen seeking career guidance and 2) support incoming transfer students by matching them with senior transfer students as mentors.
- Overtime, grow the peer-to-peer mentorship program to include alumni and professional affiliates along with the student mentors to help with career advice.
- Establish a fund to aid in the expansion of support for career networking events, panels, and seminars in order for undergraduates to gain additional business perspectives focused on the chemical sciences.
John Arnold, Professor of Chemistry and the College's Undergraduate Dean commented, “Mentorship opportunities help everybody. It connects our alumni to our current students and provides a lot more opportunities for everyone. This is a great endeavor. It will help provide more support services for our undergraduate students. We hope everyone will consider donating to this worthy student initiative.”
According to the campaign's website, "Each component of this campaign was developed with an over-arching goal of building a better support mechanism for all undergraduate students within the College of Chemistry."
Please consider giving to this very important initiative. If you donate during BIGGIVE on March 14th, it will count toward our overall College goal of donations on that day.
