Abstract:

Mentoring is a practice that dates back hundreds of years, the story relates that Aristotle was one of Plato's disciples and this in turn was one of Socrates, so a vast amount of practices occurred over time, perhaps not conceived as a formal or informal mentoring program, but from 1920 mentoring programs began to be formalized (Houston, 2020) and from 1980 they grew massively (Hobson et al., 2009). Mentoring is attributed to the relationship between a person with greater knowledge and experience (mentor) and another (mentee) who requires guidance and advice.
The study presents a Student Mentoring Program, which is one of the pillars of a new educational model called the TEC21. The program is part of an accompaniment model, consisting of three links, academic accompaniment in the exploration stage (exploration academic directors), in the focus and specialization stage (academic program directors), and the student mentoring program that accompanies the student throughout his career to contribute to his well-being focusing on seven dimensions: Physical, intellectual, emotional, spiritual, occupational, social, and financial.
The student mentoring program consists of mentors, peers, and student communities. The mentor is a guide and counselor whose main objective is to support in ensuring the success of students, as well as lead efforts to ensure a memorable university experience. Student success is conceived as the development of the person holistically in the seven dimensions. So given the importance of the student mentoring program, interest arose in determining the relationship between the mentoring program and the well-being of students concerning the seven dimensions longitudinally, that is, considering the 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022 generations.
The methodological approach was mixed quant -->qual (Creswell, 2007), the quantitative results were complemented with the qualitative results. The quantitative results were obtained from an instrument with a Likert scale of continuous qualification (1 to 100 points) that was released to the students. Four focus groups were applied for qualitative results, one for each student´s generation.
Among the most important results, they highlight that the four generations of students agree that the dimensions most promoted by the mentor are emotional, social, and spiritual, moreover, younger students evaluate the Student Mentoring Program better. The study concludes that, although the student mentoring program still has areas for improvement, it contributes positively to the students ‘well-being and thus makes their university experience memorable.

References:
[1] Creswell, J. W. (2007), Qualitative inquiry research design. Choosing among five approaches (2nd Ed.), California, United States, Sage.
[2] Hobson, A., Ashby, P., Malderez, A., and Tomlinson, P. (2009), “Mentoring beginning teachers: What we know and what we don’t”, Educational and teacher education, Vol. 25 No. 1, pp. 207-216. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2008.09.001
[3] Houston, M. J. (2020), “Faculty Mentoring Programs at Academic Institutions: a Systematic Literature Review and Suggestions for Future Mentoring Programs”, International Journal of Engineering Technologies and Management Research, Vol. 6 No. 10, pp. 24–30. doi: https://doi.org/10.29121/ijetmr.v6.i10.2019.457

Keywords:

Mentoring program, higher education, educational innovation.