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Instructions for students
Mentoring sessions last an hour, and are generally run over Internet Relay Chat (IRC) on public channels. When you pair up with a mentor, they will let you know which channel to use. (If you haven't used IRC before, don't worry - you can find tons of beginning instructions here, and if you don't have client software you can use freenode's web client.) Other communication tools such as etherpad, pastie, screen and file sharing, etc. may be used in the course of a session, but the primary medium is IRC.
You'll be in communication with your mentor over email and github before you meet up with your mentor (see below).
All mentors have gone through the MU core course, and our teaching skills have been been reviewed by Gregory Brown and other alumni. Don't be fooled, this doesn't mean we are experts! Programming skills are many and varied and difficult to assess even after months and years of work. We may not be able to help you on your specific problem. But we find that in most cases, even talking through a problem and getting feedback from folks who have some experience with ruby and programming design, is beneficial.
It's important that you have some concrete problem or question you are working on before you sign up, so that your session can be focused and not waste session time formulating it. If you don't have a specific problem in mind, we suggest picking a problem from Ruby Koans, Project Euler, Internet Problem Solving Contest, or MU's own Puzzlenode.
When you sign up for a session, your mentor will be in contact with you to schedule a session, and to find out more specifics of what you want to work on. Generally you will need to provide some code samples. This gives us some sense ahead of time what to focus on, and who among the volunteer mentors may be most suited to work with you.
If you're signing up as someone who submitted an application for MU through puzzlenode, send us your submitted solution(s). If you're an MU student who dropped out of the core course and want some tutoring to improve your skills to try again, some of your MU work may make the most sense. Whatever it is, it's best if it's something you are currently working on and care about.
All sessions are conducted on public, logged channels. Afterwards your mentor will summarize the session and provide a link to the full logs, which will be posted as a page on this wiki.
Please note we do not conduct sessions in private under any circumstances. You should be comfortable with this for everything you discuss and code in sessions. So save the startup ideas and business proposals for another venue!
Our focus is on teaching and learning ruby "in an atmosphere that promotes intellectual curiosity, social responsibility, and getting things done". We practice the principles of Free Software here as elsewhere at MU. This doesn't mean you can't discuss commercial projects here.
But please remember also that we are all volunteers! When you ask us for advice, technical or otherwise, about a project you may make money from, consider whether the conversation is aimed generally at learning and teaching programming techniques and skills. We do not provide free consulting. If you want to make an arrangement for payment, and/or further one-on-one mentoring outside of MU, work that out individually with your mentor.
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Open an Issue on this github repo. This will put you on the queue. In the issue, make sure you include the following info:
- your name, or how you'd like to be identified
- your email
- your availability for meeting (dates and times) in the next 2 weeks
- a description of what you'd like to work on in the session, including any links to code if possible.
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A mentor will contact you soon about scheduling a session, if necessary asking for more details. This is done via comments on the 'issue' you opened. (If you have notifications set up in Github (the default), you will see these on email as well. But please respond to questions via the issue log rather than email).
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When you arrange a time to meet, the mentor will close the issue (you'll get notification of that too), and tell you which IRC channel to use.
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If you or your mentor need to reschedule, communicate directly with each other to arrange another time.
As mentioned, after your session your mentor will put up a report summarizing the session and a link to the full IRC logs. These reports are found on this wiki, accessible from the Mentoring Sessions page.
Please take some time to add comments about the session, if any, on these pages.
Or if you prefer to give an anonymous evaluation, you can fill out this survey.
You can sign up for another mentoring session at any time (sessions are run continuously). Note that those who are applying to MU and existing MU students will have queue priority, especially during busy times.