A Hand in the Fog: Graduate Students as Virtual Peer Mentors in the COVID-19 Crisis

Accurate and timely dissemination of critical information while facilitating reciprocal communication channels is critical during times of crisis. The Graduate Student Leader (GSL) program is a peer-based leadership and mentoring intervention that proved helpful in addressing the needs of a large and diverse student body of approximately 1,300 graduate social work students during the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic. The GSL program is designed to facilitate virtual communication using e-mail, instant messaging, and virtual conferencing and, as such, exists as a supportive mechanism for both online students and students who typically attend classes on campus. This qualitative study used focus groups of current students (n=20), individual interviews with current GSLs (n=9), and analysis of instant messaging responses (among faculty, staff, and GSLs) to document the effect of the GSL program during the first 4 months of the pandemic. Four major themes resulted from the analysis of the combined data: advocacy and information sharing, program impact, program need, and comradery. It is evident that the GSL program represented an important mechanism through which students could easily connect with one other, share resources and support, and facilitate communication between students and university administration. Implications of these findings, including implementation recommendations for other graduate social work programs, are included.