"The mediocre mentor tells. The good mentor explains.
The superior mentor demonstrates.
The greatest mentor inspires !".
- Lucia Ballas Traynor
A little bit of Background:
Learn it Girl was designed with an aim to help women learn a programming language while doing an awesome project! Each accepted mentee gets a mentor to help them through discovering their new language and coding their great project.
LITG provided road map templates, task assignment and monitoring tools as well as regular self-assessment forms.
Although, the program was designed to 'help learn a particular language', my mentee requested for a more practical and industry-oriented course than merely learning python over 12 weeks. We decided that we'll focus on the applications, and that she'll pick up the nuances of the language alongside. This was the timeline
For my program info visit the LITG website
Application process:
The application is itself a learning and self evoking process. It lets you brainstorm an idea that you are passionate about, a technology stack that interests you or a specific language that you want to learn. It makes you focus on the things that matter to you.
Mentee application: If you look at the questions in the application to become a Learn IT Girl scholar, you will realise that it’s more about you. The application consisted of various questions, targeting one’s motivation and experience. Why you want to participate as a scholar? What is your past experience with programming? Why do you want to learn a programming language that you are writing in your application?
Answer all the questions in the application with all your heart. Having some projects done in some programming language, some pushes on GitHub will be super cool, although I'm quite certain from the statistics of previous editions that most mentees who apply have no prior coding experience.
Mentor Application: I don't quite remember the exact application questions, so forgive me for that. If I remember right, we had a couple of questions on the languages you are comfortable with, your past experience and why you want to be a mentor.
My journey:
An email popped in my inbox — I was so happy to find out that I had been accepted as a mentor in this program! Excited and filled with enthusiasm, I followed the steps provided in the email, for example: creating an account on the LITG platform, contacting my mentee and getting familiar with the rules.
My mentee had the following objective in mind while applying:
" I would like to learn to analyze data and get insights out of it and so projects which aid me in my journey towards it. I find the development space in my country a lot delusional and confusing, for people into it and people who want to work in this field. I would be interested in developing visualizations from data collected that support the research. Research data can include Organization working in the space, qualifications required, experience required, or any other relevant information collected from surveys or other means. So that any individual wanting to make a successful career into the development space can get a repository."
Despite having lead and taught at workshops and mentorship programs in Robotics and Computer Vision with a participation of more than 50 women each, my time with ‘LITG’ program has left the deepest impact on me. The LITG program hosted an online platform to track work progress. I was assigned to mentor Srishti Gupta : a woman 5 years my senior, who already held a full time job. The fact that I was to teach someone older led to some awkwardness. Our mutual passion towards coding drew all agitation apart, and we found common-ground in our deep-rooted vision to make a positive change in our community. Apart from our shared enthusiasm for programming, we bonded based on the unfortunate experience of being a women in a male dominated stream.
Our goal was to implement Computer Vision to aid the visually challenged in indoor navigation. This was an ambitious task, as she had not much prior experience with programming. Over a span of 9 weeks, we progressed from elementary python to machine learning and neural networks in Pytorch and OpenCV.
Challenges:
I took time out to help debug code, review assignments, despite my hectic college schedule. Sometimes, with exams round the corner and other project deadline, it would be quite challenging to manage to devote sufficient time to her doubts. We did face a lot of issues, majorly attributed to the fact that it was a virtual internship, and it's hard to replicate installation issues and hardware bugs. Luckily, my mentee was smart and quick at grasping things; so she got the hints fast.She being regular and proactive, didn’t require constant intervention. Her progress was greatly catalysed by her enthusiasm and dedication. It's not just the successes I found invigorating as learning experiences, but also the failures.
She had an aptitude for code, and it gave me genuine satisfaction to help her overcome self-doubt and the fear of inadequacy she had due to learning to code later in life. Despite her full time job, she would complete the week's tasks in 2-3 days of time and ping me asking for more reading material and tasks.
It is an incredible learning experience to have a mentee who pushes the mentor to work harder xD. She inspired me to keep pushing myself.
This experience, her progress in particular, has encouraged me to further engage in such mentorship activities and compassionately give back to my community.
Best Part:
The mentee gets to decide her projects, including the final project. In our case, she came up with a few ideas, and we discussed the pros and cons of implementing each one of them.
Final Word for future mentors:
Plan your schedule and meetings beforehand: Create a google sheets ( or any other tool like when2meet) where you outline your free times in terms of the exact time and duration, as well as the number of hours you can contribute per week. Ask your mentee to fill in this document as well. This is super effective in distributing the amount of tasks between the 12 weeks.
Engage in Constructive Criticism: You’re there to further the mentee’s development, so don’t avoid giving critical feedback. Also, do encourage your mentee and celebrate milestone accomplishments.
Redirect the mentee instead of giving solutions: You want to improve your mentee's thinking process and help her learn the skills necessary to independently debug code in future. Considering time and efforts, it might be easier to directly provide a bug fix (more so, if you have faced the same bug before and finally arrived at a fix after hours of browsing and experimenting), but in the long run, it is detrimental to your mentee's process. I urge you to watch this TED-talk to understand this 'phenomena' better. (If you're a male reading this for some reason, then you MUST watch this video.)
Final Word for Future Mentees:
Clearly state your goals: Explain to your mentor what you want from this program, and maybe, even a few quantifiable deliverables that you wish to have .
Prepare for meetings: Give your mentor enough time in advance to review your work. Understand that the mentor is volunteering alongside her regular job/ college and that you cannot leave reviewing/ evaluation for an hour before the deadline.
Keep communicating and asking doubts: You don’t want your mentor saying, “I haven’t heard from you”.
PS: I have shared almost all the resources and tasks assigned during the 12 week mentorship.
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