Guiding the Freshmen Through Their First Semester

During the Fall semester, I was a "mentor" for Dr. Malmberg in his EXS 197 lab. I was assigned a group of 7 students, 6 were freshmen and the other was a transfer junior. My duties as a mentor were to practice certain skills that these students will need as a physical education major and also help them with any issues they have with transitioning to the college life. For every Friday since the semester started, I spent 50 minutes with my students and helped them practice the skills such as a volleyball bump, serve, basketball lay-up, two-step punt, and forward and backward rolls. The total number of hours spent with the students added up to almost 11 hours. I thoroughly enjoyed my time as a mentor because it made me feel like I was making a difference in my students' lives because they came to me with their problems and I saw a significant improvement in their skills from the first day of class to the final test day. On the final test day, all the students were taped doing all the skills and Dr. Malmberg graded them on a scale of 1-4, with 4 being a 4 representation of the skill. Only one student got a perfect score on all of the skills, and it was my student Timothy Aubertine. Also, the highest grade from the girls was also from my group, Carissa Ficarro. Having both of the high scores be from my group made me extremely proud because it reflected how hard my students worked to become successful at their skills. Sadly, I do not have any photos from my experience to share with all of you.