Hundred sessions on Codementor and how I feel about it!

So a session today marked my 100th session till now. It's been close to 6 months since I joined Codementor as a mentor and the experience so far has been very enriching. I have been able to learn so much during these sessions which I would have never imagined when I joined.

I was never a full-time freelancer and used to squeeze in my sessions after I get off work and it was never easy. I had to say 'No' to dozens of 'Friday-night-pub-crawls' to accommodate sessions. I've learnt a few things along this journey and wanted to add a word of wisdom for new mentors to learn from.

1. Look at profiles of other mentors who have done 100+, 200+ sessions and try to make your profile better. The way experienced mentors write their bio, projects, experiences etc. make a good first impression.
2. Your first message to a mentee should NOT be the default message. Personalize the message so that the other person knows that you are actually trying to look into it.
3. Read the problem statement completely and try to understand it as much as you can and determine if it is in your scope.
4. Be very kind and polite. If your mentee is out of budget, try helping him out for free because sometimes things like these go beyond money and your mentees will feel very happy about it.
5. Issue a refund if you were not able to help your mentee out. It leaves a very bad impression if you don't.
6. Try to expand your skillset by learning new tech yourselves and aiming for sessions in different verticals. Ex. If you are a Python dev, try learning HTML, CSS, Javascript and expand your skillset. This way you'll have more requests/mentees to target.
7. Last but not the least, push your boundaries and accept requests which you might be a bit skeptical about solving. There have been many instances where I accepted a session but the issue was very difficult to solve. But thanks to my perseverance the issues were solved and everyone was happy.

Keep in touch with your mentees and see if you can help them out in any way. Be kind, nice and go the extra mile to satisfy them and that's enough assurance for them to come back to you whenever they face an issue.

To the next 100 sessions!