About Mentoring Track
Mentoring is deemed as one of the most important strategies of training as it includes giving instructions, guidance and assistance to students by specialized experts of distinguished expertise to enable them to fulfill the learning tasks that are difficult to fulfill individually. Mentoring can be defined as a relationship of direct communication that links the students to an expert in a specific scientific field so that they may improve their knowledge, and grow their abilities and skills. They also assist students to invest their time, and achieve their individual needs to increase their scientific achievements, skills, abilities and productivity in the future. In the light of this relationship, the expert models and simplifies the learning task or the required skill to be leaned by the students, enabling them to deal with these tasks. When the expert develops the ability of the students to deal with task or skill, they will be able to complete it independently, needless to the expert unless it is necessary.
Furthermore, mentoring works as a motivator to students learning, increase of motivation. In addition, it facilitates the transfer of knowledge and development of higher thinking skills. This is because it provides actual problems that allow students to learn and think like experts in the field so as to provide possible solutions to the problems in a context of a cooperative learning society.
The Mentoring Track comes as one of the supportive enrichment programs in the distinguished and talented students program, giving a chance to the new students and the distinguished ones who could not meet the required conditions to join the distinguished students program, so that they may benefit from this program, and consequently a wider range of talented students could be covered at the university level. It also comes as a supportive program for the students of the talent track in order to develop and scaffold their talents.
In this track the direct communication is achieved between the talented or distinguished (expert) faculty member and the students over a period of at least one academic semester so that their knowledge may increase, and their skills and abilities may develop and deepen, in one or more fields that they need, not offered to them within their curricula of specialization.