Hello everyone, The semester is rapidly approaching so if you're interested in proposing a project I need to know by Tuesday and I need your project proposal by Friday. Please let me know if you have any questions. -Kendall On Wed, Apr 30, 2025, 12:42 PM Kendall Nelson <kennelson11@gmail.com> wrote:
Hello All!
Are any of you interested in mentoring students to work on any projects you have on the backlog?
This is what I have from one of the Profs of the course:
------- To remind you of the ask from last year (and *call out differences for this year*):
- We are looking for projects that a team of 4-5 students could tackle together with at least two mentors for each project. As we saw last year, mentors can certainly overlap projects if appropriate and they have the time. (Life happens and having the built-in mentor redundancy helps. I’ve had mentors get laid off, change jobs, and take summer vacation.) - Mentors are expected to meet student teams once a week for an hour (via any video conference setup folks want to use), and to be available by email during the rest of the week to answer any urgent questions. - *This summer we are running the class from 13 May to 31 July (11 weeks)*. - *We want to try teaching concurrently in both campuses Doha, Qatar (GMT+3) and Pittsburgh (GMT-5), USA. The entire course will be taught virtually this year, without a classroom.* I certainly did something similar a few years ago when I was teaching at Hopkins (20 students) with another group in Galway (16 students). The morning class in Pitt will be the afternoon in Doha. - *We likely have 15-20 students in each location, so if you had on the order of 4-5 team projects with mentors that fit the format, like last year, that would be fantastic. * - *We are considering going so far as to choose the teams across time zones to get them working remotely from the start.* Last year, after six weeks together in class and daily stand-ups, the students scattered home away from Doha, and all of them worked remotely the last four weeks. They proved they could work remotely together. Of course, the relationships with mentors have always been remote. The profs in Doha and Pitt want to try remote from the beginning. (I have a few concerns but I’m also always up to experiment on students.) - We post the projects on the first day of class and will organize the teams in that first couple of days, so student teams are introduced to their mentors in the first week of class and expected to organize that first meeting to begin the project learning curve. That’s when mentors point students at any tutorials and bootstrap materials, recommended getting started materials, etc. - We have set the expectations with the students that they will be spending 20-40 hours of time per week on the project. It is an internship-like experience. - *Two co-teachers run classes on three days a week for 50 minutes, and I will guest lecture a collection of classes. *(Last year, there was just the real professor and I.) - The three of us will provide a coaching session with each team to ensure they are working with the mentors well. - Students generally have Windows or Mac laptops, but we have teaching assistants on each site that we can start to prep any other access to resources they might need. - As with last year, mentors have a lot of freedom to experiment. Some have run joint sessions if they are mentoring more students for learning curves. Some have run Slack or Discord channels.
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So, who is interested in working with students?
Please let me know if you have any additional questions.
-- Kendall Nelson *Senior Upstream Developer Advocate* The OpenInfra Foundation <https://openinfra.dev/>