Can I Help With That? The Role of Goal Setting in a Technology-Enabled Peer Mentoring Program

College students face significant mental health and academic challenges and often struggle to navigate university resources. Students from marginalized backgrounds face additional barriers to help-seeking and are less likely to utilize campus services. Peer mentoring programs can help bridge this gap and are most effective when they are goal-focused. Technology can help scale these programs by offering mentee-mentor pairs a structured approach to setting goals and facilitating mentors' ability to provide targeted support. In this study, we explored a peer-mentoring platform that enabled incoming first-year college students to message their mentors and track goals. Goal setting was significantly associated with students' grade point average at the end of their first semester. After controlling for platform engagement, goal setting remained a significant predictor of self-efficacy and life satisfaction. Goal setting within peer mentoring relationships may serve as a brief, scalable intervention to promote academic success and well-being during the transition to college.