Client: Colorado College
Task: The Quad students were tasked with constructing ideas and designing a structure for a women-to-women mentoring program that could be seamlessly implemented into the Colorado College campus departments.
“We enlisted the Quad to help us create a meaningful mentoring program on campus. I was impressed with the ideas, professionalism, openness to feedback, and outcome of the project. All students and leaders were incredibly helpful and thorough, with frequent and clear communication. I appreciated the diversity of thought that went into our project and sincerely hope to work with the Quad in the near future on more projects”
–Lucie Tennis
In the Spring of 2020, the Colorado College IT department identified a gap within their staff mentoring programs due to a lack of female identifying-specific mentorships on campus. Quad students were tasked with designing a structure for a women-to-women mentoring program that could be seamlessly implemented into Colorado College’s varying departments. They were further pushed to look at the female STEM community mentorship due to the lack of female presence and female-specific mentoring in the collegiate and professional industries.
Students began their research collecting data from top nationally ranked staff mentorship programs and then chose the best parts of each program to implement into their own design. The students then conducted a survey on female identifying employees’ perspectives regarding their access to mentors and how they feel the lack of a female focused mentor program has hindered their opportunities within their workplace and professional lives. Using this data found from research and surveys, the team then structured multiple female-to-female mentorship program ideas and experimented with multiple mock mentoring sessions to test their structure.
Quad students created a program overview that compiles the structure, recruiting, training, mentee/mentor matching, program sustainability and a projected schedule to accommodate Colorado College’s block system. Pairing their mentorship program overview with an executive summary of their specific research and survey data, the student team gave a well-rounded report giving insight to Colorado College representatives. This report included a new perspective on their mentoring program and detailed steps to better the work place for their female identifying employees.