Abstract:
Luke Skywalker was on a mission to save his world but he couldn’t do it on his own. He needed partners. Like Skywalker and the Rebel Alliance, many FYE programmes start small with high hope but have to battle stronger forces with sometimes entrenched ideas about how things have always been done. The challenge is how to initiate a pilot first year mentoring scheme and built it into a sustainable programme which will attract faculty and wider institutional support. This paper charts the progress of a fledgling FYE programme in the Faculty of Arts, University of Auckland, and outlines the benefit of building internal and external alliances to help guide that growth.