Mathey unveils mentorship program geared specifically for female students

In direct response to the recommendations of the March 2011 report of the Steering Committee on Undergraduate Women’s Leadership, Mathey College is currently piloting a mentoring program specifically geared toward female students.

The program, called Women of Mathey Advising Network, is aimed at encouraging informal bonding activities primarily organized by the participants that will ensure that “underclassman women will feel more confident as they transition to life at Princeton,” according to Allison Daminger ’12, who proposed the idea for the program last spring with Catherine Ettman ’13. Ettman also served as a member of the Steering Committee.

“Each year, we have wonderful new juniors and seniors drawing into Mathey from other colleges that don’t know the new students,” said Mathey Director of Studies Kathleen Crown. She added that the advising network would be a “great way to help the new upperclassmen connect meaningfully with the freshmen and sophomores, especially since they would be living and dining with them all year.”

In March 2011, the Steering Committee reported that female students on campus gravitate to behind-the-scenes positions in campus extracurriculars — leaving men in more prominent offices — and hypothesized that this was because female undergraduates do not believe they have the skills to seek high-profile elected office. The report recommended that mentoring programs be set up for female students, especially in the residential colleges.

Crown pointed to a trend she has noticed in underclass students, particularly freshmen.

“Before they come to Princeton, [female students] have expressed an interest in leadership,” she explained. “But after their first few weeks at Princeton, their interest had dropped off.”

Daminger agreed with Crown, saying in an email that “many of the [Committee’s] findings resonated with [her] own freshman year experience.”

Over the summer, the student leaders and Crown contacted women within Mathey whom they considered exemplary leaders and mentors to start organizing the pilot program. Daminger emphasized that mentors in the network had to “have leadership experience or potential and [be] friendly and approachable.”

But even with qualified mentors, Steering Committee Chair and Wilson School professor Nannerl Keohane acknowledged the difficulties of randomly assigning mentors to students, suggesting that participants be given a chance to complete a personal interest questionnaire before being matched up to a mentor.

“A lot of it is just chemistry and you can’t really tell who people get along with,” she explained.

Though Mathey is thus far the only residential college to initiate such a program, the Women’s Center is also piloting a similar initiative called the Princeton Women’s Mentorship Program, led by Ettman and Caroline Kitchener ’14. In addition to social activities, the program will organize lectures, alumnae events and networking opportunities specifically for women.

Within the Princeton Women’s Mentorship Program, students will be placed into “pods” comprising one member from each year. This allows for a greater diversity of interests in each mentoring group, explained Kitchener.

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“Plus it’s more fun to hang out with a group as opposed to just two people,” she added.

Kitchener cited her own personal relationship with Ettman as an inspiration for the bonds she hopes will form between students involved in the program.

“My personal goal for the program is to ... allow a lot of women to receive the same kind of mentoring that I did from Catherine,” she said.

In light of President Shirley Tilghman and the Board of Trustee’s recent ban on freshman rush, there has been speculation that the new campus female mentorship programs are aimed at compensating for the relationships that freshmen would have otherwise formed with their sorority sisters. However, Crown holds that these advising networks should and will not be a direct replacement for any other mentoring relationship on campus.

“One thing we want to convey to women in the network is how important it is to have multiple mentors at each stage of life, and for different aspects of your life,” Crown said. She acknowledged that “many of the upperclass mentors are sorority members, and they see this activity within the college as valuable in addition to their other mentoring roles.”

Daminger, who is a member of a sorority herself, said that while there exist some “definite similarities” between peer advising and sorority relationships, her team has “primarily used women’s mentoring programs at other universities as [their] model.”

Keohane also emphasized that the pilot mentoring programs were a direct response to the results of the Steering Committee Report rather than the ban on freshman rush.

“Everything we heard said that the [existing forms of mentoring] weren’t enough,” Keohane said.

Around 40 students have expressed interest in the Mathey Advising Network, and 85 women have signed up for the Princeton Women’s Mentorship Program. Last week, both programs held meetings for interested students and are currently in the process of setting up mentor-mentee groups.

“We’ve gotten overwhelmingly positive feedback so far,” Daminger said, adding that “many of the upperclassman mentors have expressed a wish that such a program had existed during their freshman or sophomore year.”

That the programs are geared toward only female students, however, raises the question of whether mentorship for male students is being neglected. Currently, Mathey is also starting a co-ed advising program between juniors and freshmen that will involve occasional coffee or ice cream dates.

But Keohane maintained that the current priority is still women’s mentorship.

“My own hunch is, if we started out insisting on making everything co-ed, we would have missed an opportunity to find out what works particularly for women, and men as well,” she said. “I think this is an important step, and it’s what we need right now.”