September was a very busy month for the Organizers. Community sign-ups & project submission was ongoing, initial applications had to be reviewed, and we had to prepare for a new cohort.
During the entire community sign-up and project submission period, I hosted mentor and community onboarding. We had a few new communities and coordinators that needed to be onboarded. We also had several mentor on-boarding sessions for both coordinators and mentors.
These sessions are for mentors to get answers or clarification about the program. It’s also a chance for me to get insights about how to provide better support for mentors. A question came up during one of these sessions from a mentor. The question was, ‘Apart from technical skills, how do I as a mentor know that an intern is committed to the project/community?’. This is one of those questions where people think mentors should automatically have answers to, which isn’t exactly true.
An intern being committed to a project goes beyond just having the skills to work on a project. It’s also about how much the intern enjoys working on the project, their motivations and what they expect to gain from the internship.
In the final application form, there are questions that ask applicants about their past experience with OS and past experience with the community they’re applying to. Usually applicants fill these with things like past contributions, how they’ve used OS tools or their experience with a community. The answers are usually impersonal, so it’s really difficult to learn about the applicant and their motivations.
There is another field named “Community specific questions”. This field is for communities who want to ask applicants questions that aren’t on the application form. Different communities ask different things on here, and some don’t make use of it at all. This is a perfect place for mentors to ask interns about how the internship would help them grow. However, it’s not a very obvious use for it. This is why we plan to include more questions in the final application that asks the applicants these questions. Sage created an issue for this on the Outreachy website’s Github repo.
When this change is implemented, mentors will learn more about what the applicant hopes to gain from the internship. They will understand how they can help the applicant meet these goals during the internship.
In the last onboarding session we had, two past interns from the May 2024 cohort joined. They became new mentors in the December 2024 round. We also had a mentor from a new community who was a part of the meeting. Towards the end of the meeting, the new mentor asked the past interns what they look for in a mentor. They also asked what made them decide to apply to those projects. After they answered, the mentor said they could tell how passionate they were about their communities and how much they enjoyed being a part of it. It felt really nice that these sessions are also used to learn from other mentors or, in this case, past interns turned mentors.
September was a very busy month, but I appreciate all the conversations I had with mentors. Till next time!
Tilda's Thoughts 