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Lael Alva didn’t know what to expect before he started his first year at Queen’s as an undergraduate health sciences student. He was coming from Oman and felt unfamiliar with Canadian academics and culture. When he received an email about the QSuccess First-Year Mentorship Program the summer before arriving, he decided it would be worth trying to see if it could help him adjust to living and studying in a new country.

The program helped him acclimate quickly to life at Queen’s and in Canada, and after taking part in QSuccess he wanted to be able to support others in the same way. So he became a mentor himself, working with four first-year students last year and three this year.

“I want do my part to make it easier for someone starting at Queen’s, to show them that they are going to find their people here – that they’re going to like it and fit in,” says Alva. “Some new students are uncertain about how to get started at university, and I find it really rewarding to ease the tension my mentees have. They remind me of myself just a couple years ago.”

The QSuccess program is run by the Queen’s Student Experience Office and began as a pilot program in 2015. It has grown rapidly and now has 170 upper-year mentors helping more than 800 first-year mentees every year. Mentors receive holistic training before they begin in their roles, and mentees select their mentors through an online platform. Mentors share short bios to the platform highlighting their programs, interests, and other facts about themselves to help mentees decide whom to pick. Enabling mentees to self-match in this way gives them the opportunity to find someone whose background or interests resonate with them, which supports equity in the program. After mentees choose their mentors, the two typically meet bi-weekly, either in person or online, and mentors help their peers navigate academics, social life, and everything in between.

“QSuccess is powered by the community spirit of Queen’s students, who are committed to helping each other thrive,” says Gabriela Ludusan, Peer Programs Coordinator, Student Affairs. “The program has been growing steadily because first-year students really value the personalized advice they can get through one-on-one mentorship. And quite a few mentees who go through the program decide they want to become a mentor themselves to help others in the same way.”

Personalized and flexible mentorship

Inspired by his own positive experience as a mentee, Alva aims to have a flexible mentorship style, adapting his approach to the needs and personalities of his mentees. With some mentees, he focuses on helping them find clubs or other social opportunities. With others, he spends more time on helping them learn how to succeed in university courses. Above all, he wants them to know they can count on him, so he keeps a consistent schedule for meetings and often reaches out to see how they’re doing.

Alva’s former mentees appreciate the personalized attention they received from him and speak highly of the role he played in helping them succeed in their first year.

“What I really appreciate about Lael is that he’s genuinely interested in helping others,” says Arian Sadeghi, a second-year health sciences student and Alva’s former mentee. “If I had any kind of hardships academically or anything going on in my personal life, I felt like I could speak about it with Lael and he’d give me advice or direct me to some Queen’s resources that could help. He’s also genuinely interested in getting to know his mentees, and we’ve remained friends. I’m really appreciative of that and how QSuccess helped me develop this kind of relationship that is going to last way longer than just my first year.”

Dev Patel, also a second-year health sciences student and former mentee of Alva, says he decided to sign up for QSuccess to help him adjust from a high school with fewer than 500 students to a university with thousands.

“Lael really made sure I was in a good position at the beginning of my first year, and since we’re in the same program he gave me a lot of tips about how to succeed in coursework and adjust to the bigger workload of university,” says Patel. “He also helped me prepare for an interview for a club I really wanted to join, and when I told him I like to play sports he let me know about all the different intramurals I could join. To this day we still play badminton together and hang out.”

Learn more about QSuccess on the Student Experience Office’s website.