The civil'in programme a peer mentoring programme for first-year students of civil engineering

Abstract

In 2015/2016, the CIVIL'in mentoring programme was created to better integrate new first-year students of the Master of Civil Engineering (MIEC) at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto (FEUP). Since then, the programme has a peer mentor assigned to each new student to accompany him from the beginning until the end of the first academic year. Every mentor is always associated with a professor for support and orientation. Mentors receive actions of specific formation in the beginning of the year. As expected, according to results obtained from a survey, mentors expressed the benefits achieved from this programme, namely positive attitude, teamwork, leadership and communication skills that will be relevant for their future integration in the professional environment. Evaluation of CIVIL'in has been done by daily observation, analysis of surveys by both mentors and students and by academic marks results when compared to a control group. The overall results have been satisfactory and it is believed that adjustments in routines and some particular practices have contributed to steady improvements of the programme. This methodology still remains essential for CIVIL'in to fulfil the initial established purposes.