Welcome to campus (or welcome back) everyone! Mentor and Mentee applications for OUTreach Peer Mentors are now available. Our program trains current Dartmouth students as mentors to help peers develop a positive LGBTQ identity while successfully adapting to life at Dartmouth. The program hopes to help students explore their personal interests, take advantage of campus resources, and find their own sense of community. If you're interested in becoming an OUTreach mentee or mentor, fill out the appropriate attached form. Note that in nearly all cases, mentors must be from the class of 2014 or above. Some prior experience navigating Dartmouth's LGBTQ community helps a lot in mentoring. Interested in being a mentee? Here's what some of our mentors have to say about their past experience as a mentee: "My LGBTQ Mentor helped me integrate into the LGBTQ community here. He introduced me to other members of the community who were his friends and also discussed with me my concerns over food almost weekly. As such, it provided with me with a means for having my questions answered, my concerns overcome, and my identity more comfortably discovered and thus made my freshman year overall a whole lot easier." "I want to help LGBTQ students in the same way that my mentor helped me, and I want to be able to give back to a community that I am just discovering and that has welcomed me in a wonderful way. Coming to school for me also meant coming out for the first time, and it added a lot of stress and uncertainty to my freshman year. I learned that I could talk to people, and it meant a lot to always have someone special to lean on who had gone through similar experiences, and I want to be that person for someone else now." Our program establishes mentorships with varying degrees of confidentiality. If you're concerned about strict confidentiality, please make a note of it on your application and we will ensure that your level of comfort is respected. Deadlines: Our mentor training for the fall will be conducted THIS SUNDAY from 1-6 pm. All mentors interested in training this fall must submit applications by 6 pm this Saturday, Sept. 24. The next training opportunity will be spring term. Mentee applications can be submitted whenever they are completed. To ensure matching with a mentor this fall, please submit your applications by Saturday, Oct. 1 at noon. Applications are accepted at any time. Blitz this account with confidential questions and concerns whenever! We're here for you, OUTreach Peer Mentors http://www.dartmouth.edu/~opm/