A final year medical student, passionate about teaching, global health & international Communities.
Maths Mentors
Maths Mentors is a mentoring program designed to address maths confidence and offer help for students that need it. Uniquely, our mentors are not tutors or teachers; they are Deakin students trained to guide students through asking questions and assisting students in finding answers on their own.
Maths Mentors
Maths Mentor (MM) is a mentoring program offered by Deakin Student Helping Student Hub (SHS) that provides students with guidance in any maths problem.
My journey with Maths Mentor started in 2018, in the first year of my medical school. With my previous undergraduate background in bioengineering, I was determined to remain connected to maths through my medical school year. Maths Mentor presented as the perfect opportunity for me to remain connected to maths and to begin building my leadership through developing mentoring and teaching skills.
As a mentor, I take pride in assisting students through their challenges with maths. However, nothing brings me more joy than leading students to be independent learners through developing their problem-solving skills. Through being part of Maths Mentor, I have learnt that there is a difference between mentoring and teaching with mentoring playing a greater role in guiding mentees through their learning journey. I believe the saying of “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime” best embodies my vision of my impact as a mentor. I made it a mission to ensure that I am not just providing the “fish” to any student coming with a maths problem, but they will leave with some new skills on “how to fish”. With complex problems that students often find overwhelming, I would guide students to practice breaking down their questions into small bite-size problems. Furthermore, in this digital world, I would also lead students through the process of finding useful information online to facilitate them in solving their problems to foster digital literacy.
Apart from problem-solving skills, I also focus on increasing confidence in students when facing maths. Having been a student with low confidence in maths previously, I wanted to use my mentoring role to lead, encourage and support students positively. I often use supportive and encouraging language to guide them through problems in a step-by-step manner. Praising the critical thinking that the students have undertaken while they tackle the problem, building their confidence a step at a time. Through this, I aim to reaffirm their thinking process and foster their confidence in their own thinking. Ultimately, I aimed to demonstrate to the students that it is the process of solving the problem that is where valuable learning is taking place, rather than merely getting the right answer.
In addition to mentoring students, I have also taken lead in the improvement of the Maths Mentor program over the years. I have taken part in various promotional activities for Maths Mentor such as promoting Maths Mentor in different lectures and at the International student Welcome Community Fairs. These opportunities have allowed me to improve on my leadership ability such as communication skills and public speaking ability, but more importantly, increase the awareness of our amazing program amongst the student body. Over the years, Maths Mentor has seen a steady increase in uptake of our services from students all across different faculties and I believe these promotional works played a great part in increasing awareness of our service.
As the Maths Mentor program expands, I was honoured to be awarded the position of Senior Maths Mentor in 2019 where I took up the additional leadership role of leading and training new Mentors. This opportunity enabled me to further build on my leadership skills, as I learnt to share my experience and pass down the passion, skills, and knowledge I have learnt to other mentors. In a sense, I am using the mentoring and leadership skills I learnt mentoring students to now mentoring junior mentors in becoming a better leader for all the other students to come.
Despite being the senior mentor, I prefer to work with my colleague as a team with a flat hierarchy as I am a big believer in teamwork and lifelong learning. Each and every one of us has something that we can learn from, and a teamwork approach enables all of the mentors to have a comfortable environment to learn and improve. My favourite part of being a senior mentor is discussing different approaches with junior mentors on how they can better guide students through their problems with minimal intervening. Often the hardest thing to learn as a mentor is to learn to sit on your hands and watch the students fumble through their problem-solving. As the struggles are often where the student will learn the most and intervening early will prevent that learning from happening. Through these discussions, I could really see junior mentors developing their own mentoring style and learn not to intervene in student’s learning process too early. Witnessing the growth of other mentors and watching them find their passion in mentoring like how I did was very rewarding and fulfilling. In my role, I have had lots of fun, and many fond memories working alongside my fellow mentors. It solidified my passion for teaching and mentoring which I wish to be able to incorporate these skills I have learnt into everything I do in the future.
WHAT PEOPLE SAY
Megan Theodor,
Peer Support Program Supervisor
(Maths and Numeracy)
Our program has benefited directly from her leadership skills, with Sylvia being actively involved in training new Maths Mentors. Through her insights into mentoring, she has helped prepare and train our current team. Sylvia is happy to take the lead and initiate change. She is dynamic and her positivity and work ethic lead our team daily.
Sylvia’s communication skills tie in well with her ability to work in a team. Sylvia and I have had mentor sessions together where multiple students come in at once and we have to scramble to help everyone, however these instances have never been an issue thanks to Sylvia’s calm collected manner and ability to communicate the necessary tasks among us
As a new mentor at Deakin, Sylvia showed me the ropes and has played a big role in my abilities as a mentor. Not only does she help students find answers to their mathematical problems, but she also encourages students to be independent learners. As a Senior Maths Mentor, Sylvia is very approachable and very happy to provide help and advice to other math mentors.