This seems like a good topic to talk about this week, given that summer is here and I have received my first official intern at my new job. In my almost five years at Amazon, I witnessed five internships seasons, but was never asked to take one on. I certainly did my fair share of helping where I could if we got someone on our team, and it’s no real surprise given my history of teaching and mentoring. And that’s what I’m going to write about today, my experiences with mentoring and why I do it.
I feel like it’s easier to start with the why since that is what has driven the when. Even as early as grade school I knew that I was a teacher at heart. It comes pretty naturally to me and I have no issues with dropping anything I may be currently doing in order to help someone work through a problem. Well, as long as the person asking for the help actually needs it. I do get short sometimes with peers who can’t seem to do things on their own and require constant re-education, but when I know the person is new to something, I can’t help but want to lift them up.
Aside from being really good at it (or so I’ve been told by others), teaching is my form of service that feels the most rewarding. Other people give back by feeding others, sheltering others, fighting for others’ rights, healing others physically and spiritually, etc. And those are all great, but they aren’t for me. I’m okay just giving some money here and there where I think it’s most needed. Teaching though, that’s something I could have made a career out of. Even now, I’m pretty convinced that if I leave the software industry, I’m going to spend my time teaching what I can to others. While I certainly don’t have the time right now, I could even talk myself into adjuncting a class for a local college on top of a regular job.
My initial foray into teaching was simple enough. I don’t remember exactly who approached me about it, whether it was one of the grade school teachers or my parents, but everyone around me knew that I had a brain for mathematics. I was always a grade or two ahead of my classmates. So I was asked if I wanted to run an after-school math class for lower-grade students who were looking to advance beyond their current level. It was only one day a week for a couple months, at least that I can recall, my memory is not great so many years on. But what I do remember is that I had a great time. Planning the lessons, going over how to do things in class, grading papers, all of it. It ended up just being a flash in the pan as there were no follow up classes, but it was a spark of inspiration for me.
From there, pretty much until I graduated college, and even a little bit after that, I was always helping classmates try to understand things that they couldn’t get from the lectures. I never did any official tutoring, but I certainly gave a lot of unofficial sessions. Mostly in calculus, but there were also a lot of computer science topics I could teach because I had prior experience before college that a lot of others didn’t. Especially in classes where the professor obviously had no real world knowledge of what they were teaching (looking at you database administration class).
After college I had no real opportunities to continue tutoring or teaching. During my first couple jobs I was the junior developer on those projects, so I was the one being taught for the most part. But I did get better at explaining myself to peers and getting them to see my way of things. That skill has become super valuable, especially at my current job where I have more sway on policy and direction.
I didn’t get another chance to really teach until Amazon, where I took on more of a mentorship role. While I didn’t get any interns, I did have a couple official mentees, though I wouldn’t say any of them were really that fruitful. I put in a lot of work coming up with mini-lectures and project ideas, but with one exception they all ended before they could get going. The mentorship program there is designed to be driven by the person seeking help, so many people will say they want help but few follow through. That’s just human nature, and also the nature of a workplace where people are crazy busy all the time. So the mentoring was mostly off the books, lending guidance to people on the team who were still new to programming in a real company.
This all leads to now, where I’ve got an intern of my own. It’s a good thing for our team right now because we’re lacking enough development talent to keep up with the pace of the project, and it’s been proving difficult to fill the gap. It’s definitely going to be a lot of work on my head because I have to be there to help and guide him, make time for all my usual work, and I’ve also become the second-in-command for my team, so I have managerial stuff to take care of from time to time too.
Hopefully things will turn out well with my intern. After just a week it’s hard to say what he’ll be able to do in the two months we have him, but he seems to be taking everything in and is eager to make something happen. I’ve done enough work with college students through interviewing and mentoring that I feel like I should be good at assessing where to set stretch goals and where to ease up, and come out at the end with a finished product he can be proud of. We’ll see in August if I’m as good a mentor as I think I am.