Designing a Student Mentorship Program
Process Creation | Project Management
This piece showcases how my passion for mentorship transformed into an operational framework for facilitating a student course-based mentorship program. This collaboration I manage between Verizon Connect and Georgia Tech has significantly increased team mentorship opportunities and generated four research/design projects that have provided valuable foundational knowledge in in high impact roadmap areas.
Overview
Problem
With fewer and fewer UX internship opportunities available in the market (and at Verizon Connect), I was keen to find mentorship opportunities for my team that provided equivalent business value. The answer was Georgia Tech’s MS-HCI Foundational Research Methods course, which invites industry partners to sponsor projects. But participation is only half the battle—in order to bring the best possible experience to Verizon Connect and the students, I developed a framework for our mentorship program to streamline the collaboration and maximize output.
Project Goal
Develop a scalable, repeatable process framework for the Foundational Research Methods course collaboration that:
builds on the educational needs of the course project
enables high business impact
supports a variety of team mentorship goals
empowers students to fine tune mentorship support and network with the wider team
My Contribution
I am the primary process creator and project manager for this piece of work.
Team
Stephanie Baione, Alexa Carleo
Timeline
May 2024 - present
Tools
Figjam, userinterviews.com, Dovetail
Background
In an increasingly competitive UX job market, there are few resume and portfolio entries that job hunting students and hiring managers value more than industry experience. For the students, it’s a window into the world of professional UX work beyond classroom hypotheticals; for the hiring manager, it’s proof that the student is capable of applying their professional skillset to tackle industry problems and have real impact. But in times of economic recession, the traditional form of industry experience—the internship—suffers. And while the immediate detriment is to the students, it’s also a blow to industry professionals like myself who know how valuable student-led projects can be both from a mentorship perspective and as a mechanism for challenging your company’s industry and UX process biases.
That’s why I sought out alternatives for Verizon Connect and became an industry partner for Georgia Tech’s MS-HCI Foundational Research Methods course. As an industry partner, I submit a prompt that represents a strategic challenge facing my company and industry, and I am assigned a team of first year MS-HCI Masters students to advise for 16 weeks as they research, design, and validate new, innovative solutions to these problems. Over the two years that I’ve been leading and developing this collaboration, I have transformed Verizon Connect’s contribution into the model for course-based mentorship programs and am continuously iterating and improving on our model so we can continue to give the best experience to the students and derive high impact business value from their contributions.
Project Goal
Develop a scalable, repeatable process framework for the Foundational Research Methods course collaboration that:
builds on the educational needs of the course project
enables high business impact
supports a variety of team mentorship goals
empowers students to fine tune mentorship support and network with the wider team
Course Timeline
Georgia Tech’s MS-HCI Foundational Research Methods course is taught every Fall semester. Here’s how I communicate the course requirements to my team!
1. Internal Pitch
Legal Approval
You need legal’s approval! GT had an established process with policy and NDA, so VZC just had to approve and tweak with their language.
Team Buy-in
Goes hand in hand with legal approval, but I shared things with my immediate team and got it sent out to the wider PEX team as well.
2. Preparing for Mentorship
Generating Project Prompts
Very intensive if you want it to be for maximum impact. Meet with wider team, find high value areas with The Matrix, refine prompts with continuous feedback from key stakeholders.
Recruiting Your Team to Mentor
Your team probably has mentorship goals; this is the time to enlist them! There are embedded mentors, subject matter mentors, and operations team members who fulfill different roles throughout the program and lessen the burden from one specific person.
Operations Support
Remember that these students cant see your customer data, so they’re going to be locked out of anything that has it. Consider ways to get them just enough access to do their work without taking up a ton of your time (give my example when the students had a dropoff and needed me to fix it). Also prep for communication and data sharing.
Prepare Onboarding Materials
Need to explain the company like you would to an intern. Need to onboard to the specific context in which they’re working. If they hit the ground running with good information, their project will be set up for success. Get the help of the wider team!!!
If you’ve onboarded them to your critical ops stuff too, then they’ll be more prepared to work with it during the semester.
3. Managing the Program
Embedded Mentors
Student Communication
Do it often, do it right (slack). Let them control frequency within reason/according to course recommendations.
Providing Feedback
As requested at first, but as needed if you foresee critical pitfalls. Remember tho that these students need to learn on their own, and learning can sometimes mean failure. Unless they’re going to catastrophically impact the project (eg get no interview data at all), let them practice the research and design process.
Also, you might learn something from watching them work through problems!
And you should never make changes for them. Never tell them they’re Wrong—explain how you think they could be more effective.
Subject Matter Experts
Process Deep Dives
All the stuff we had the designers prepare to help the students since last year’s said it was valuable.
Design Critiques / Team Feedback Sessions
Feedback on ongoing work!!
Program Managers
Primary Contact for the School
someone’s gotta do it. keep on top of things.
Solicit Feedback
from the team, the students, and the program itself to best optimize things
4. Impact
Outputs from Using this Framework
Invest in onboarding and customer understanding so they can derive maximum value from Reveal’s interconnected web of exoneration tools.
Reveal already offers a number of tools to make the driver exoneration process easier, but users need to be made aware of those features to make full use of them and get the most value out of Reveal.
Simplify the review process, and help drivers keep informed.
When you’re receiving hundreds of videos a day, it can be a challenge to pick out the ones deserving of exoneration. Safety Managers are interested in having those videos curated by Reveal and send to them proactively. Additionally, drivers are invested in their status when they’re under review, and being kept informed would help reduce stress and build trust between manager and driver.
Empower safety managers to take positive action.
Safety Managers and Drivers both care very deeply about positive recognition, so Reveal should too. Proactive tools will go a long way to making fleet management a positive actively rather than purely punitive.