Melbourne established a relatively informal mentor scheme, with women students ... The remainder of the paper is structured as follows: We rst discuss the aims.
Encouraging networking through informal mentoring | a look at a newly-established mentor scheme. Emma Norling Department of Computer Science, University of Melbourne
Abstract
This year, the Department of Computer Science at the University of Melbourne established a relatively informal mentor scheme, with women students studying second year through to honours level Computer Science volunteering to mentor groups of rst year women. The scheme was initiated in the hope of encouraging more women to continue studying Computer Science beyond rst year | although about one in four students studying rst year Computer Science is female, the proportion of women at third year level is only about 15%. It has been noted in the past that two of the major barriers many rst year women face is their isolation in the course, and their lack of self-con dence. Mentoring of small groups rather than individuals was chosen as a means of overcoming the problem of isolation, and it was hoped that the encouragement and support of mentors and other group members might help improve students' self-con dence. Although it is too early at this stage for us to tell if the mentor scheme will achieve its aims, initial feedback from students has been very encouraging. The structure of the scheme seems to have successfully encouraged networking amongst the rst year students beyond the small group structures that they were initially assigned to. The mentors seem to have developed their own network, which spans several year levels of the course. This paper discusses the structure of our mentor scheme, and some of the positive and negative aspects that have been identi ed. We suggest steps that could be taken to avoid some of the problems, and conclude with a brief discussion of our plans for the future.
1 Introduction The Department of Computer Science at the University of Melbourne has become increasingly concerned about the small proportion of female students in its courses over the past few years. Studies of enrolments have also shown that not only is the proportion small in rst year (approximately 25% women), but the proportion decreases at each year level, down to about 15% in third year. At honours level, there have been only one or two women studying each year for the past few years, making the pool of potential women postgraduates considerably limited.
The department has a signi cant number of women in the academic sta , providing role models for the female students, but as noted by Professor Eileen Byrne [1], the use of role models to encourage women has become extremely popular, but seems to have no proven success. Mentoring takes role modelling one step further, with role models taking a personal interest in their mentees, providing encouragement and support. This form of encouragement has been shown to have far more obvious success. Our mentor scheme was established this year to provide support and encouragement to rst year women in Computer Science. It has had an unplanned side e ect of developing a broad network of women across several year levels. Many of the rst years commented that the scheme helped them t in and feel like they had a place in the department. The remainder of the paper is structured as follows: We rst discuss the aims of our scheme and the structure we decided upon, then the practical implementation of the scheme. We then discuss the pros and cons of the implementation, and nally present our conclusions.
2 Aims The mentor scheme was established as a method of encouraging more women to continue studying Computer Science in the later years of their course. It has been noted in the past that many of the women at rst year level do not seem to know very many people in the class, and they often mistakenly believe that they are not performing well enough simply because they have no one else to compare their progress with. The mentor scheme provides informal networking, introducing rst year women to other women in their course, at several year levels. It is intended that this will help students to realise that many other people have faced the same diculties and overcome them. The older students will often be able to provide solutions to the problems that they themselves faced. In addition, getting to know other rst years studying Computer Science will give students a chance to compare their progress with others, and realise that many people nd this a dicult course. The mentor scheme has not been set up to provide academic support for students, and the mentors themselves are not expected to have any knowledge of the rst year course. If any of the mentees do need extra academic support, the mentors should be able to refer them to the appropriate person(s) | usually the tutor-in-charge.
3 Structure The structure we have used for our mentor scheme is informal, relative to most other schemes we have looked at. This is largely due to the aims of our scheme, and the practicality of implementation. We felt that rst years would relate more easily to younger mentors, and even if we had wished to provide \profes-
sional" mentors, with approximately 150 women in rst year, this would have been quite a dicult task. For these reasons, mentors were volunteers from our second, third and fourth year students. This year, all the mentors were women, although we do not consider this to be a pre-requisite. Each mentor was given a group of 3 to 5 rst year women, who were grouped roughly by their course. This small group structure was practical in term of the number of volunteers we had, but more importantly, it was chosen to help rst years meet other people in their courses. In addition, the mentors were encouraged to arrange meetings in conjunction with other groups, to further foster networking. In addition to the small groups, there was a mentor scheme co-ordinator, and a number of sta and postgraduate students in the department who were willing to help in whatever way they could.
4 Implementation In mid-December 1994, a letter was sent to all women who were intending to enrol in second and third year Computer Science subjects in 1995. It outlined the proposal for the scheme, and asked students to get in contact with with the mentor scheme co-ordinator if they were interested in the scheme or wanted to nd out more. Over 20 students responded to express their interest, and met informally for lunch a couple of times to discuss ideas about the scheme. Some students withdrew from the scheme due to other commitments, and with the addition of the two women honours students, we had 18 mentors. We agreed that by singling out the women students, we might make them feel uncomfortable, which could be harmful in terms of attracting them to join the scheme. Because of this, rather than making an announcement at lectures, or some similar form of advertisement, we approached the students on an individual basis during their rst laboratory class, explaining the scheme, and giving them a form they could ll in and return if they wished to be involved. We didn't really have any idea what the group sizes would be in advance, because although we were expecting approximately 100 women in rst year, we weren't sure how many would want to be involved in the scheme. As it turned out, we had a larger than usual rst year intake this year, resulting in about 150 women in rst year. Of these, approximately 80 returned their forms, resulting in group sizes ranging from 3 to 5. Because we wanted the scheme to be in place as soon as possible, we did not have a chance to do any sophisticated matching of mentors and mentees, but decided to group them roughly on the basis of the course they were studying, and randomly within that restriction. Students were introduced to their mentors and other group members at a barbeque hosted by the Department early in rst semester. Those who could not attend the barbeque were contacted by their mentor to arrange their rst meeting. After this, it was left to the discretion of the individual groups to arrange meetings, although mentors were
advised that a 15 minute weekly meeting was the minimum that we expected. During the mid-year break, one of the mentors [3] was employed to conduct a telephone survey of the rst years who were involved in the scheme. Many of the results of this survey are discussed in the next section. The number of people, men and women, studying rst year Computer Science in second semester is only about one third that of rst semester | this is mainly due to the structure of the engineering and combined course, where students take this subject in rst semester of second year. Because of this, the number of women involved in the mentor scheme also dropped considerably, but the women who were still studying Computer Science were also encouraged to continue meeting with their groups on a regular basis.
5 Evaluation Evaluation of the scheme so far has been through the survey conducted midyear [3], and discussion with individuals involved in the scheme. Students were enthusiastic about the scheme, but also highlighted some areas which can be improved in future. The vast majority of students that we surveyed or spoke to on an informal basis thought that the mentor scheme was a good idea, and all of them said that they would recommend the scheme to others. Students greatly appreciated the opportunity to meet other students, both at their level and in later years. The barbeque used to launch the scheme was an overwhelming success. Being early in semester, very few people knew each other before attending the barbeque, but a lot of friendships began at this meeting. Many students said they would have liked to have more large group meetings, and this is something that will de nitely be organised next year. One problem that was encountered is that some students (about 10) never managed to meet their mentors, because they were unable to attend the initial barbeque and after that, unable to organise times that were mutually suitable to the group. To overcome that problem, next year we will ask students to indicate their available times when they return the form, so that we can assign people to groups on the basis of times available instead of (or perhaps as well as) by course. A related problem is that we tended to rely on email for communication. Many rst years were not comfortable with this, even when they had someone to show them how to use it, especially at the start of the year. This made it dicult for groups to organise meetings, as we had no other easy way of contacting students. In future, we will give students the option of leaving their phone number, so that mentors have some other way of contacting them. This will be optional, giving students the choice between telephone and email. In addition, the more regular large group meetings will give students a xed time when they can meet to organise smaller group meetings. It was inevitable that there would be some problems with a semi-random assignment of students to groups, and indeed some students were matched with
mentors that they had problems relating to. In most cases, these students just stopped attending meetings, and we didn't nd out about it until we conducted the mid-year survey. Because we want to get the scheme underway as close to the start of semester as possible, it really is not practical to do any careful personality matching between mentees and mentors, but we do need to overcome this problem. In future, we will need to make it very clear right from the start that if there are any such problems, students can contact the co-ordinator to be transferred to a di erent group. Despite the fact that the mentor scheme was not meant to provide academic support, a small number of the rst years still believed that this was one of the aims of the scheme when we surveyed them, and complained because their mentors couldn't help them with their projects. We did try to make this clear, but obviously not clear enough. In future, we will need to state our aims very carefully, stressing that there are other people available if they need academic help. As far as the mentors were concerned, most seemed to manage quite well, however in a few cases they were a bit unsure about how well they could help the rst years. This didn't seem to depend on their level of experience, and in fact the second years who volunteered proved to be the most popular mentors. Mentors were given lea ets at the start of the year containing any information we anticipated that they would need, such as contacts for various problems, but many said they felt more practical training, in the form of workshops, would be useful. This is something that will be implemented next year. Some of the rst years complained that they didn't meet often enough, and that things seemed very disorganised. This is probably because we left groups to organise their meetings, but many rst years felt too shy or insecure to ask for meetings. In future, we should instruct the mentors to arrange meetings on a regular basis, especially at the start of the scheme, and attend them even if not all the members of their group can make it.
6 Conclusions Although we will not be able determine whether we have been successful in encouraging women to continue into later year studies of Computer Science until next year, the response from students so far is very encouraging. The women in rst year Computer Science seem to be less isolated than before, due to the network that has been established by the scheme. Later year students are able to give reassurance that the problems rst years are encountering have been faced and overcome by others, and students have a sense of belonging that hasn't seemed to exist previously. Feedback from students has highlighted several areas in which we can improve the scheme, and we will try to address these next year. The two major changes that will be implemented is training for the mentors, and regular large group meetings. Mentors will be encouraged to take more of a leading role in the group than before, to give rst years a stronger sense of guidance.
This is the beginning of an on-going project, and we hope that next year's second year enrolments will show that it is a worthwhile one. It cannot be expected to completely turn around the trend that we have been seeing, but we hope that with the implementation of some related programs for later-year students, we can encourage more women to complete their course in Computer Science.
Acknowledgements: I would like to thank the many sta in the Department who have given their support to the scheme, particularly Associate Professors Peter Thorne and Liz Sonenberg. Also I would like to thank Fiona Low, one of the mentors in the scheme, for all the extra work she has contributed to the scheme. Finally I would like to thank the Equal Opportunity Unit and Student and Sta Services at the University of Melbourne for providing us with a grant through the Equity Initiatives scheme.
References [1] Byrne, Professor Eileen. Women, Science and the Snark Syndrome: Myths out, policy strategies in. Women's Su rage Centennial Science Conference, Wellington, New Zealand, 1993. [2] Almstrum, Vicki L. Improving Mentoring for Women in Computer Science Fields. A joint panel for 1993 CSC & SIGCSE Technical Symposium, Held February 18, 1993 in Indianapolis, Indiana. [3] Low, Fiona The University of Melbourne Department of Computer Science Mentor Scheme initial report avail. at http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/ms/survrep.ps
