Helping first-generation students transition into college
First-generation students, or students who are the first of their family to attend education past high-school, are shown to struggle graduating from the college setting. As first generation students, there is not much exposure or knowledge about the types of resources that other students utilize to succeed and benefit themselves. Even if students are aware of the resources available, understanding how to use them appropriately is another obstacle to overcome.
MentorMe is a mentorship program turned into an application that focuses on addressing the information gap that arises amongst these first generation students. Our goal with this application is to give first generation students the opportunity to find mentors who can help them with their professional growth in the college setting.
In order to help you find the mentor who is your best fit, specifying your preferences will help us help you achieve those goals. Filter your mentee experience through our options of the educational level of the mentor, their degree/major, avaibility to meet with you, and any other hobbies or interests that may be of relevance to helping fostering your experience as a first-gen student.
Our list of mentors are undergraduate students or graduate students from the University of Washington to guarantee that their experience is one that can provide you the best tools to develop professionally and professionally in your first few steps throughout the journey that is college.
After sifting through our mentor list and viewing their experiences, select the mentor whose experience may benefit you the most. Enter a conversation with our in-built messaging system to learn more about how you and that mentor can create a mentee-mentor relationship that will help you succeed.
Throughout the prototyping phase we created a paper prototype that help to visualize and test out the functionality and process of our idea of the mentorship program. Upon recieving feedback from our paper prototype, we implemented changes such as removing features such as a calendar and creating tasks to focus on pairing mentees and mentors.
Walkthroughs, user-testing, and interviews were implemented throughout the prototyping process. Interviews helped us to understand if we were addressing our original problem. With walkthroughs and user-testing, We defined four tasks for users and our selves to evaluate such as signing-up/logging in, creating an account, communicating between mentees and mentors, and pairing up with eachother. Through testing, we discovered that there wasn't enough flexibility within the application's structure.
Throughout this process, we found that we missed out on a lot of low-level details during the prototyping phase and had to narrow down the functionality of the application to what we thought was the most important. Based upon that, we focused on elaborating and redefining the pairing process to ensure a more quality experience for mentees. If we were to go through this entire process again, taking into account the perspective of the mentor's side more would be one change we would focus on ensuring as we gave more priority to mentees in the design.
Informatics Student
Sociology Student
Informatics Student