Trying to solve the challenge of meeting times

During the first few weeks of the peer mentoring scheme, it became apparent to me that my mentees timetables often clashed meaning that there seemed to be no time where we were all free to meet. I wanted to try and nip this problem in the bud and put together a doodle poll with different times available in the week for them to vote when they could attend a meeting. After prompting them to complete the poll for over a week, I finally had some responses to try and work with. Only 4/7 mentees completed the form so I still didn’t have the full picture but from the votes on the poll, no more than 3 people could meet at the same time. I did not have the time in my schedule to run 3+ meetings a week to meet with everyone so I knew that this was a challenge I would not be able to fully solve. As a temporary solution, I chose a time when the most people could meet and made it clear that if the others wanted or needed to, they could meet with me at a separate time or I would be happy to move meetings online to make them more accessible. Due to the lack of appeal for using zoom now when things are back in person mostly, the zoom sessions I did run, that people said they would join, had no attendance. I continued to try and brainstorm ideas that could help the situation but nothing seemed to work, I tried to set meetings similar to office hours where they knew I would be at a certain place for an afternoon, but no one attended. It was difficult to accept that maybe they didn’t need my mentorship and guidance anymore. After the first two weeks and all of their initial questions out of the way, they seemed to settle in to university very well and no longer required the scheme. This didn’t cross my mind at the time because my head was clouded by my own experience of settling into university which was quite negative.

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