What I Love about Being a Peer Mentor

My time as a peer mentor is flying by and with hiring right around the corner, I thought I would share what I love about being a peer mentor.

Throughout my time here at Laurier, I have loved seeing students succeed. When I became a peer mentor, I started to be a small part of student success every week, which is an amazing feeling. What I love about the Centre for Student Success is that everything we do here is a collaborative effort. As peer mentors, we work as a second set of eyes to help students revise their own work. This is an awesome approach because the students’ success is their own. We help students make the changes they want to make and submit work that they are proud of.

During my time as a peer mentor, I have seen so many incredible perspectives and ideas, which has helped me grow tremendously as a writer. I was kind of expecting this, but what I was not expecting is how much working as a peer mentor would help me improve as a reader. This development is interesting to me because I always saw writing as a process, but reading as a skill that you acquired. My job here has shown me the evolution of a reader as well. As a peer mentor much of what we do is to take the role of the reader to help students see their work from another perspective. This has changed the way I read my own work as well as students’ work. It is all too easy to get caught up in stylistic differences between your work and someone else’s; something that I now approach much differently. I try not to get caught up in the little things and lose sight of the bigger picture. We all write differently, and this is something I have come to appreciate more and more during my time here working at the centre.

In all, I initially became a peer mentor to help people, but this position has helped me in ways I never expected. If you enjoy learning and want to help others, I highly suggest you check out the employment opportunities available at the centre. You never know how working as a Peer Mentor can also benefit you!

Chelsey Kerr
Peer Mentor