Bantam Network
The Bantam Network is a mentorship program that creates a support system for first-year students, connecting them to faculty and their fellow peers. This network of support and relationships then follows students for the rest of their years at Trinity.
The Network was founded in 2015 in response to a call President Joanne Berger-Sweeney had made the previous year asking students to design a mentoring network. Five student design teams took part in the challenge and each presented their ideas to a panel of judges in March 2015. President Sweeney then announced that the team “Bantam Network” had the best overall design, and they would be implementing parts of the other teams' presentations into the final product. The Bantam Network was first implemented in the fall of 2019 for the incoming class of freshmen.
On Convocation Day, students are given a closed box at check-in. Within the box is a t-shirt assigning them to one of the 10 “Nests” that are a part of the Network. These Nests each have deans, Residential Learning Coordinators, and peer mentors associated with them that students can reach out to in order to gain a sense of community and belonging.
In 2019, to ensure that the outreach of support would follow the students beyond just their first year, The Bantam Network took over the Office of Residential Life and transformed into The Bantam Network Residential Learning Community.