Guidelines for the mentoring rep
This document is intended to be a primer on the mentoring program for
incoming graduate students in the computer science program at Rice
University. It is written primarily to be of use to the Mentoring Representative, but
should prove handy to the individual mentors, and offers everyone else
some perspective of the program.
Purpose
The program is intended to ensure incoming students have at least one
contact person in the graduate student community. The mentor should
assist the student settle into the department and academic program,
and hopefully also prove useful as the new student settles in Houston.
Just as the eponymous Mentor assisted Telemachus acquire the skills he
needed for survival, we expect our program will help incoming students
through the often rough initial period, and will enable them to make
contacts and friendships.
Implementation
The program is administered by the Mentoring Representative (the
``rep''). Early in the summer, the rep must contact the department
and obtain a list of incoming students. (N.B.: This list is
liable to change as the summer progresses.) Simultaneously, it is
worth inquiring which current graduate students are interested in
being mentors. I ask volunteers to state preferences along the
following dimensions:
- Research interests
- Geographical origin
- Gender
- MCS vs PhD
(Obviously, depending on the profile of the incoming class, one or
more of these may be irrelevant.)
Ceteris paribus, I tend to prefer students who are neither too
new to, nor too advanced in the program. The former tend to still be
finding their own way around (and are often loaded with coursework,
labbying and other duties), while the latter tend to be somewhat
removed from the course of events, and might not be up-to-date on
their information. Of course, the best mentor is an enthusiastic one,
irrespective of age or preferences.
Note: The MCS program presents certain problems, since PhD
students are rarely aware of the details of being in that program.
Also, the incoming group will typically far outnumber the available
MCS volunteers. Lacking anyone else, I found it useful to assign two
PhD students with broad perspective to the entire group of MCS
students.
Calendar
The following schedule might prove useful:
-
Early summer: rep contacts the department and the graduate students.
He assigns mentors to students, and arranges for them to contact their
mentoree.
-
Mid-summer: the rep ensures that the department has sent out all
relevant material to the students, including the mentoring
information.
-
Orientation week: the rep holds a meeting of mentors and students,
making sure they meet each other. Where reasonable, students are
given help to settle in Houston and at Rice.
-
First week of classes: the mentors should meet their students and help
them with class selection, B exam requirements, etc.
-
Follow-up: the rep should ensure that the mentors meet with their
students one or more times in the subsequent weeks and months, and
especially near the end of the semester (before B exam preparation
time).
-
Spring semester: after the B exam results are out, the rep should
organize sessions where graduate students from each group give
informal presentations about the nature of research, work, and
personalities in their group. A separate session should feature
faculty presenting this information from their perspective.
-
Late Spring: by this time the new representative should have been
elected. (Unlike other reps, the mentoring rep is not chosen in
August, since that is the height of their reign. Instead, they are
chosen during the Spring.) The old and new representative should meet
and coordinate. Updates to this document should be considered.
Mentoring Materials
The rep should make sure incoming students get at least the following
collection of material. Many of these are ``automatically'' sent by
the department, but in the past, some students have reported not
receiving some of the material. The materials are split into two
parts: those useful before entry, and those handy after commencement
of the academic year. The following are useful before arrival:
- Departmental brochure
- GSA Yellow Pages (Note: This is meant to be the
old Yellow Pages. The new one is only available after the
school year starts, which is too late for people who would find
information about apartments, food, drivers licences and so forth
invaluable, even if it's a touch out-of-date.)
- Rice Off-Campus Housing Guide
- Houston map
- Campus map
- Academic calendar
- Orientation Week information
- List of important phone numbers, email addresses and URLs
- Mentor contact sheet
- List of texts for courses regularly taken
These are perhaps most useful after arrival at Rice:
- Departmental information sheet: basic deadlines and requirements,
coffee club, fridge room, etc
- Computing references: how to configure your environment
- Taylor's and Chris's guide for
graduate students
- A PhD Is Not Enough
- On Being a Scientist
- How to do Research at the MIT AI Lab
- Other articles about graduate study
Activities
The following activities have been suggested during the first few
weeks and months of the school year.
During orientation week,
- Campus Tour
- Computing Orientation with sessions for Unix, Emacs, LaTeX, the
Web, scripting and other utilities
- Pizza lunch with older graduate students to discuss classes, grad
school, focus, research, etc.
- Orientation for labbies
During the second week, the library orientation. There is talk of
adding a Houston orientation as well.
Late in the Fall semester, a review session for the B exams. First
year students should be allowed to grill a senior student on the
solutions for a B-exam question.
During the second semester, research presentations by the faculty and
by graduate students. The latter should tend toward being more
informal and geared to giving the new students a feel for what it's
like to be in each research group, interact with people there, and so
forth.
A few things remain to be done:
- Add a checklist to the handbook. This should include items such
as getting computer accounts, getting id cards and registering.
- Tell students who don't know Scheme that it may be in their best
interests to sit in on 210 in the fall.
- Inform students about the research seminars.
Notes
Beyond this, the mentoring program takes creativity and interest. It
is especially important that the rep remain active and help the
mentors be of maximal use. A few issues worth noting, in no
particular order, are:
- Some students come well before the start of the academic year
(notably to work with someone at Rice). It is important that their
mentors be in Houston at the time those students arrive.
- It is increasingly common for incoming students to want to post
articles on local newsgroups for various purposes. The rep should try
to help out with this.
- There is an unwritten tradition that students arriving in Houston
who need assistance with transportation from the airport, or a place
to stay the first night or two, are helped out by current grad
students. The rep can facilitate this process.
- In addition to the PhD and MCS students, there is one more class
of student-age people coming here: the visiting student scholars.
Their needs are often vastly different from those of the other two
groups. The rep should try to accomodate these students too.
- As an incentive to mentors, the department has offered to pay for
a get-together; ideally, this could be a pizza party held after a
month of classes for the mentors, students, faculty and staff.
- It is especially important to understand that many of the
incoming students are from other countries, and often from vastly
different cultures. They may be experiencing considerable culture
shock. The mentors should appreciate this and be sensitive to it. In
some cases, it might be helpful if the student were put in contact
with local cultural groups (such as Indian Students at Rice and the
Chinese Student Association). Since the Foreign Student Advisor also
looks into these matters, it would help to coordinate with her.
The mentoring program is a beneficial and enriching experience, to
both the incoming students and the mentors. Good luck! Please
contact me if you can offer improvements to this document.
An Important Reminder
(Thanks to John Lu for reminding me to include this.)
One point that should be made clear to first-year students is the
overall goal of the program. They are here primarily to do
independent research, which includes investigation and publication.
Passing B exams and taking classes are secondary to this goal. Thus
it is important not to get bogged down in the latter and ignore the
former.
On a more concrete note, since Rice requires students to join a
research group by the end of the first year, students need to get
actively involved in research activities from the very beginning.
This primarily means getting to know both professors and technical
areas. Useful ways of doing this are to labby a professor's class,
take a research seminar, obtain a reading list from a professor and
work through it, or (if possible) participate in a research project.
While typical first year duties such as taking classes, labbying and
studying for the B exams are important and time-consuming, these
should not be done to the exclusion of research. It is important that
mentors make this clear to their mentorees.
Shriram
Krishnamurthi /
shriram@cs.rice.edu