How Mentoring Helps Keep Me Sharp

I’ve started mentoring again.

This is the second go round. In a previous incarnation, I was a mentor with Thinkful, a bootcamp since purchased by Chegg. Over five years, I mentored over 75 students in different programs with Thinkful. I also tutored students independently in tutoring companies. This mentoring did a good job of rejuvenating my career in tech. While going through a second renaissance of sorts, I decided to describe how mentoring helps me while I help others.

• I’m reminded that there are multiple ways to help people.
• I can learn something then apply that knowledge to a mentoring session
• I can also impart other lessons while focusing on solving a particular problem
• Finally, I gain confidence and a dose of oxytocin from helping people when I can

Multiple ways to help people

When a student comes to a mentoring session, sometimes they have a particular problem in their head, but their inexperience makes the problem seem incomprehensible, or that there aren’t routes towards a solution. I get to expose that student to different search engine queries that can help solve problems. I can show them how to find timely advice on StackOverflow. In circumstances where a student is overly anxious, aggravated or irritated, I can be an ear to listen, or a gentle voice to remind the student to be compassionate with oneself.

Sometimes the student’s anxiety gives them tunnel vision/fight or flight. I had a student whose boss had given them a codebase with no documentation, and wanted them to get things to work. The student had no familiarity with the language, or OO principles in the language, so I was able to validate that the request was onerous, and was able to offer a long term strategy to fix some abstruse code.

Reinforcing Learning through Quick Application

I’ve been improving my knowledge of React& Python. One way I get to reinforce that is by investigating the requests students make and seeing how quickly I can gain knowledge in an area that I can impart to students. My experience allows me to follow a tutorial, implement it in a codepen and use that plus researched material as a guide when mentoring students and encouraging them (I do not do students’ work for them). Even if I’m helping people out for 15 - 30 minutes at a time, the repetition helps knowledge in an area sink in. Mentoring is a part of my strategy to learn or rediscover a particular technology.

The Journey Is As Important As The Destination

While investigating a problem that a student has, I often find that in the quest to narrowly solve a problem, the student’s not set up something well, or made some structural mistakes to their environment that encourage poor decisions in code. I help them revisit aspects of their environment so that the solution is easier to envision and execute.

Sometimes, problem solving is like climbing a series of mountain ranges, but one can’t see to the very top without climbing the top of some other mountains. In particular, if someone’s not set up their Ruby environment to handle multiple projects with rvm, rbenv, chruby or other tools, working on multiple ruby projects with the same set of gems can garner some confusing results. It’s akin to the advice in this video about cleaning out space in order to create.

A bunch of good advice that was helpful during the pandemic, and also afterwards.

Confidence Boost from Problem Solving

The heart of what I do as a technologist is solve problems. My problems, other people’s problems, team problems. I’ve amassed a bunch of experience that is helpful, and using the knowledgebase as a reference, I keep track of the problems I solve, large and small. It also serves as an encouragement when I ask myself either what I am doing, or what I have done. Helps me feel better about myself.

So, in conclusion, here are some of the benefits I gain from mentoring people. An example of how I can help myself by helping others, and also make some change from it as well.

You can visit my profile on codementoror mentorcruise and see if we can help each other. Thanks.