Mentor Expectations

This document contains a rough outline of the expectations for the mentor. At the highest level there are five core responsibilities:

1. Project Leadership and Management
   • General Project Oversight
   • Guide overall project direction and objectives
   • Ensure timely completion of client deliverables and documentation
   • Provide technical project guidance and direction based on your own expertise
2. Assessment
   • Grade weekly reports, draft videos and one-pager
   • More information on grading can be found below.
3. Communication with External Partner
   • Act as a liaison between the external mentor and the students
   • Make sure that meetings are productive, students are attending and acting professionally.
   • Scheduling and reacting to changes from the partners.
4. Communication
   • Be responsive to student and TA needs, making sure to communicate regularly via slack.
5. Teaching
   • Provide resources for learning specific topics or technologies
   • Work with TAs to guide student learning
6. Project Guardrail
   • Act as a guardrail on the project and raise concerns based on your understanding of people, group dynamics and generally “being a responsible adult”

Grading Requirements and how to grade

To keep projects moving we use a set of weekly deliverables: A progress report and a planning report. Each student is given a 0/5 score on each, with full rubrics available planning rubric and progress rubric.

During the final weeks of the quarter there are also deliverables around the video and one-pager. Information on the specific deliverables can be found here.

All grades are submitted via Canvas. You should have received an invite at the start of the quarter.

To grade I recommend using the grade book (accessed by clicking “Grades” on the main sidebar) and the speed grader (accessed through each individual assignment) . On the grade book page you can filter to your group by clicking “Apply Filters” -> “Student Groups” and selecting your group.

The speed grader allows you to quickly go through the members of your team quickly if you have it filtered from the grade book.

Do not fall behind on grading and establish habits early!

Minimum Expectations for Mentors

• Meet weekly with the students (1 hour). While we prefer students to meet in-person with mentors, this can be via zoom.
• Assessment via Canvas:
  • Grade weekly progress and weekly planning reports according to rubrics.
  • Grade draft videos and one pagers.
• Provide guidance to students around their problem.
• Provide Resources for solving problems.
• Be available on email & slack (check in each day to answer questions).
• Act as a communication conduit between the external mentor and the team.
• Raise concerns to Tim & Nick.
• Provide qualitative feedback on students.

Common student issues

There are two causes of students struggling. I find it is important to diagnose student struggles and then decide how much effort and time to provide. A general breakdown I find useful:

1. Software: Students struggling to install something, nervous with git, trouble to match standards of the code base, use ssh, etc.
   • Identify and resolve quickly with the help of the TA.
2. Data Science: A model is difficult to train, the available data is messy, etc.
   • Some struggling is good and useful as a learning mechanism.

Lessons Learned / Best Practices

After running way too many of these, here are some random pieces of useful advice:

• Use easy and early wins to build student confidence
• Keep expectations on students high, particularly early on.
• Penalize students for being stuck and not reporting it via the progress report.
• Start the difficult work early in the week
• Be wary of end-of-project stall
• Students sometimes want to spend weeks perfecting something that is already good enough. Stick to deadlines and keep the project moving forward.
• Don’t depend entirely on TAs
• Maintain a sense of progress at the code level
• Parallelize work where possible
• Use mock data to reduce dependencies between workflows
• Avoid isolating members from the rest of team on long running milestone
• Communication is key
• Don’t get stuck – avoid the “Yes, but” circle
• Figure out student strengths and weaknesses and try to leverage them.
• Carefully estimate required effort based on student competencies
• Some tasks will take much longer – that is fine, do your best to assign work accordingly.
• Break down tasks into smaller components then you think will be required.
• Be wary of creating an “Us (students/TA/mentors) vs. Them (partner)” dynamic
• Students do not take notes.
• Once again – do not have students work on the same task: Break tasks up into items small enough to define responsibilities around them.

Common questions and Issues:

I want to use some other project management app, can I?

Sure. But students will still be required to transfer that information to the required progress and planning docs.

A student wants to do something not in Python?

Nope. Send them to me.

I’m not sure where to take a project next?

Usually the external mentor will have a good idea, but if not, reach out to Tim or Nick.

Student Issues:

Finally, if a student is non-response, unprofessional or otherwise engaging in a manner that needs correcting please document it and let Tim and Nick know.

While we expect the mentor to be able to guide projects and provide feedback to a student’s performance there is a line (roughly around being unprofessional) where this is no longer the mentor’s problem. It is not the mentor’s responsibility to handle students who are behaving unprofessionally.