New places and unfamiliar faces is often a daunting change for an incoming Bearkat; luckily, there are SAMentors eagar to extend a paw and help make Sam Houston feel more like home away from home.
SAMentor pair night was held on Monday at 6pm in the LSC theater, hosted by the The Office of Multicultural Student Services to reveal SAMentors to their protgs.SAMentors are upperclassman; protgs are incoming freshman or transfer students.
“Pair night is when the mentors are revealed to the protgs. They just come together. It’s not really publicized because it is a private-type event.” Donielle Miller, coordinator of the office of M.I.S.S., said.
Mentors sit down with their protgs and do an initial talk about goals, classes, and they exchange contact information at the reception.
“They set up their next meeting, then it goes on a personal basis. We require mentors to contact their protgs regularly,” Miller said.
SAMentors is the university’s official student mentoring program.
“There are other mentoring programs on campus, but this program is peer to peer, student to student.”
Mentors have to be Sam students, emails have to be completed sometime at Sam, and they need to be upperclassman.
“They fill out a mentor profile with likes and dislikes and those are kept on file. Interviews are held as well,” Miller said. In the summertime the SAMentors recruit four protgs at events such as orientations.
“If a student wants to come in and wants someone to be there for them they can definitely come and fill out a profile and we will try to match them up with someone as soon as possible,” Miller said.
Since her start in July, Miller said her goal has been to help the program goal. “One of my goals is to grow the number of mentors we have. Also, with the office of MISS there is no discrimination, we have all different types of people in SAMentors, so it allows for some great interaction,” Miller said.
The Office outside of the mentors take in the step to contact and keep connection with students with a variety of activities.
“We sponsor events for them. We have a Bowling night and a big end of the semester winter ball, in Austin hall, for them to dress up and kind of culminate the year,” Miller sad. “For a lot freshman it is the first semester at college, so we should celebrate–they made it through there first semester.”
Miller said the benefits of becoming a SAMentor is giving to someone’s life. “You get volunteer hours, a lot of free stuff like free t-shirts, and they get to serve their campus community, which is always good,” Miller said. “We really like to push this program because of course our university motto is “the measure of a life is its service”. We really want to serve those students.
If students are interested in becoming a SAMentor they can contact Donielle Miller at 936-294-3588 or email diversity@shsu.edu, or visit the office of MISS website: http://www.shsu.edu/diversity.