Help me help you: Building a support network for minority engineering students

Help Me Help You (HMHY) was developed during the 2011-2012 academic year as a group-mentoring program for African-American students in the Virginia Tech College of Engineering. HMHY was based on the VT PACT, a retention program developed during the 2005-2006 academic year for first-year African-American men. The Pact, a book written by Drs. Sampson Davis, George Jenkins, and Rameck Hunt, inspired the VT PACT and was used as a framework for the program. Although students found the program beneficial, the program lost momentum and was discontinued after the graduation of the first-cohort and program facilitator. HMHY was developed to be a revamped and updated version of the VT PACT program and was open to both men and women. The focus and goals of HMHY were specifically designed to promote selfsustaining components (i.e. create a culture within the college where helping one another became a social norm and common practice), and prevent the discontinuity from occurring again. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the development and assessment of this innovative retention program. The paper begins with a brief overview of the retention strategy. Next, HMHY is described in detail. Then the assessment strategy will be discussed as well as how the support program impacted the participating students. The paper concludes with advice for others interested in starting a similar program.