AAE student Heritage thrives in Mentees & Mentors Program through Women in Engineering Program
In fall 2023, Margie Heritage worried about many things as a first-year student: classes, clubs, work and balancing all she wanted to do with all she could do while still finishing her homework.
But she never worried about bothering her one-to-one mentor, whom she met through the Women in Engineering (WiE) Program’s Mentees and Mentors (M&M) Program.
“I hit a setback in calculus, and I considered retaking the class. My first thought was to go to my one-to-one mentor,” Heritage said. “I needed advice from someone who’d already been through it, and it turned out she’d had a similar experience in a class and told me to just keep going and it would be OK.”
“Having her presence and knowing I could reach out to her at any time was so helpful to me. I could always count on her to give me her two cents.”
M&M is designed to build a network of knowledge and support for undergraduate engineering students throughout the Purdue engineering experience. Through reciprocal mentoring relationships, students can both learn and teach others how to thrive at Purdue and in engineering, both at the collegiate level and in the workforce with alumni talks and opportunities for juniors and seniors to share lessons from their work experiences. The program builds student confidence by providing a dynamic community cultivated through monthly meetings, which introduce professional development skills and mentoring tips, and laid-back social events.
The community Heritage was surrounded by enriched her social and academic life with pro tips to share with other communities, including GEARE ambassadors and the Engineering Honors Program. Mentorship even influenced which major she chose to pursue after completing the First-Year Engineering Program in West Lafayette, Indiana. She came in looking at mechanical engineering and, after talking to her mentor in the discipline for a year and a wide range of students at every monthly meeting, discerned that aeronautical and astronautical engineering would be a better fit for her interests.
Heritage was grateful that she had signed up for the M&M program. The community is centered around the monthly large group meetings and FYE students can opt into being paired with a one-to-one mentor for extra guidance and connection. Heritage knew she would benefit most from the ultra-personalized experience of individual mentorship and would still attend monthly meetings to socialize and learn from a wide array of women in engineering.
“My mentor taught me so many things that I didn’t learn anywhere else,” Heritage said. “Some were big things, like my major, and some were small things, like picking your classes. I didn't know you could pick the time slots until my mentor told me that.”
When Heritage entered sophomore year in 2024 she was selected for the M&M leadership team (LT). Heritage facilitated mentor-mentee connections by planning events and filling in the M&M one-to-one newsletter with exciting ideas for hangouts and topics to discuss each month. Ideas came from activities Heritage had done with her mentor, like picking pumpkins in the fall or getting coffee off campus.
While she doesn’t have any official mentees as an LT member, Heritage still has given and received plenty of advice to fellow M&M participants and LT members.
“It’s important to remember and embrace that mentorship is a two-way street,” Heritage said. “You're not always playing the mentor role as a mentor or the mentee role as a mentee. There's going to be things in the relationship where the mentee actually knows more than the mentor. A (first-year student) can have lived experience that helps their mentor grow in new ways, even if they’re at the end of college.”
