Mentoring Program for Rice CS Graduate Students

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