Mentor and TA Information

Table of Contents

• General Information
• Expectations
• The Weekly Cycle
• Weekly Calendar
• How to
• Escalation
• Rubrics
• FAQ
  • Can the students present their research at a conference?

General Information

Mentor Intro Presentation

Expectations

The following documents outline the core responsibilities of each position.

• General Mentor Expectations
• TA Expectations
• Student Responsibilities

The Weekly Cycle

Student work lives in GitHub. Each week:

• Each student opens an issue for their tasks with clear acceptance criteria, push code to pull requests, and post their progress as comments on those issues.
• TAs run /clinic-pr-review on open pull requests, make sure students are pushing and opening issues, unblock technical problems, and post a weekly update per project to the thread in the clinic TAs Slack channel.
• Mentors run /clinic-project-review before each meeting, run the meeting, and assign next week’s tasks with clear acceptance criteria.
• Clinic administration runs /clinic-review across all projects to identify students with no commits, students with no issues, issues without clear acceptance criteria, and projects that look like they are stalling.

The formats and grading are in the weekly tasks template, the weekly report template, the weekly tasks rubric, and the weekly report rubric.

Weekly Calendar

Weekly Calendar

How to

• How to run a Mentor Meeting
• How to run a TA Session
• TA Training Repository - Comprehensive training materials and technical standards
• TA Training Presentation - Interactive training slides

Escalation

• Escalation and Common Failure Modes - who to reach out to and issues you might encounter.

Rubrics

• Weekly Tasks
• Weekly Report
• Peer Review
• Final Email
• Mid-quarter presentation
• Draft/Final Videos
• Draft/Final One-pager
• Final Technical Deliverable

FAQ

Can the students present their research at a conference?

Where we have had success:

• Poster sessions locally during a quarter. These work really well, a subset of students can generally attend and they are good events for everyone. We are able to print posters.
• Non-academic publications, such as white papers in the public interest space. In this case much of the work tends to be exploratory and relatively light weight, so it is much easier to review.
• If the research interest aligns with the (internal/UChicago) mentor’s interest. In this case there is alignment and the UChicago mentor has the incentive to verify as well as the requisite knowledge to understand the research questions, how to write it, etc.

A couple of caveats:

• Generally speaking students will promise to do additional work after the quarter ends, but will not. So if the conference deadline is after the quarter then I’d expect to have to do the work yourself. While some students may continue onto the project into another quarter there is no guarantee.
• Student work… is student work. We do our best to put in place systems (TAs, mentors, etc.) to help review things, but I wouldn’t (personally) put my name on any of the work that a student has done without reviewing it in detail myself.