Mentoring can be enlightening for you. It gives you an opportunity to learn many aspects of this training program, such as understanding people from a diverse background across the globe, communicating in a general tone so that mentees who have English as a second language can understand easily, handling tough situations when something odd pops up in the middle of the program, and many more.
Mentee evaluations are conducted two to four times throughout the duration of the mentorship program in order to provide mentees with feedback on their progress.
Depending on the mentorship program, program admins may choose to have 1:1 check-ins, written evaluations, or virtual meetings with your mentees. Mentors work directly with the program admin to find out how the evaluations should be conducted and submitted.
Only after receiving a satisfactory evaluation, mentees can submit an Expensify report and receive their stipend. \
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Managing the project plan is as crucial as creating it at the start of the project. Without properly managing the already prepared project plan, success becomes difficult. Following are some points to consider while following the project plan:
Ask for regular status reports: Status reports play a vital role in properly evaluating mentees. They are also important for you to track if a mentee is progressing towards completing a milestone or if a mentee is facing any issues. It should not happen that you get to know after two weeks that a mentee has missed a milestone. To avoid such irregularity and not-acceptable moments, you should ask for regular updates.
Check for completed tasks: Ensure that you are keeping a track of all the assigned tasks, and when they are completed or to be completed. Analyze and do what suits best for your community.
Discuss about missed deadlines: If a mentee slips a deadline, you immediately raise a flag, discuss with mentee, and ask for a valid reason. It’s advisable to ask for an official communication on this. Let them know that this might impact their performance and future engagement with the community. If it happens frequently, let your program manager know about this. Keep in mind that you aren’t just teaching a mentee, you also are preparing a future contributor, so, dedication and commitment are must for a mentee.
Be Humble: We all are humans. It’s not just mentees who might slip a deadline, it can happen with you also when it comes to scheduled meetings, providing feedback on completed tasks, reviewing a piece of code, and so on. If such a situation arises that you need to miss a meeting or deadline, ensure that you communicate this to your mentees and the community if needed well in advance.\
You will be engaged with mentees right from the application process. During this period, you will work with mentees in creating a project plan, deciding on scheduled meeting times, and so on. As a mentor, it is your responsibility to prepare mentees before they start contributing to the project. It might take some extra effort for you to prepare the mentees who are new to the open source community. Following are some goals to keep in mind:
Make Mentees familiarize with the development environment, such as the version control system, communication channels, bug trackers, and necessary documents to read.
As this mentorship is a step-by-step process, and mentees will be evaluated on a periodic basis, you should define the project planning, strategically, and keep tangible requirements ready for each evaluation period.
Help mentees engage socially with the community
Encourage and prepare mentees to actively participate in all areas of this mentorship program, starting from coding to documentation.
Provide reasonable time for mentees to learn and adapt to the open source community and culture.
Successful mentorship starts with proper planning at the start of the project. As a mentor, set expectations at the beginning of the program. Even if mentors take a call in setting expectations, it’s always advisable to collaborate with mentees while documenting project planning and expectations as mentees need to agree on what is expected from them to do.
Following are some points to consider while setting expectations:
Expect Leaves: Ensure that you have considered planned and occasional leaves, such as holiday times, health issues, etc. Discuss with mentees and finalize how many hours mentees can dedicate per week, and talk about reachable goals as well.
Consider Mentee Inputs: Ensure that you have Mentee inputs before finalizing on the project expectations in terms of weekly hours and deliverables. At times, mentees, especially those who are new to open source development, might agree initially for everything, but might not be able to stick to the agenda afterwards which will impact the learning program. So, it is your responsibility to encourage them, make them comfortable, and ask questions related to planned leaves, if mentees are using any cyber cafe for the internet (depending on mentee’s geographical locations), and some more so that things can be planned better.
Be Prepared for Unusual Happenings: Even if everything is planned mutually, there might be times when mentee can’t show up in the scheduled meetings or fail to submit a deliverable because of some unavoidable environmental or natural problems, for example natural calamities, or sudden health issues, and so on. Keep in mind these situations while setting expectations, but do not express them to mentees. Break Goals: Break the bigger goals into chunks for easy tracking and for making this easier for mentees to achieve mageable goals. This way it also boosts mentees’ confidence when they reach a milestone.