Being a mentor at Udacity
July 10, 2019
A few days ago, the last student from my first cohort in the Virtual Reality Nanodegree graduated, resulting in the completion of my cohort with a 100% success rate. Being a student of the course myself, I knew the importance of the mentor. I received great mentorship from my mentor during the mentorship and now it was my turn to help others.
My cohort started in the mid of the march. As part of my mentorship program, I had to give weekly webinars on the topics relevant to the mentorship. I also had to provide 1-on-1 help and track the progress of the students. Since I knew everything on the course plus more, I thought this was going to be easy. But I quickly found out that it wasn’t.
When I was preparing for my Webinars, I found out that it’s easy to understand something, it’s much more difficult to make someone else understand it. Normally when I try to understand something, I try to relate it to something which I already know. This helps me in building simple analogies. These analogies are helpful only for me or someone like me. But when you are teaching to the general audience, you have to make analogies which are common among them all. And the things which are common among everyone are really simple everyday things. So, when you are teaching complex things to someone, breaking them down and relating them to everyday things is essential.
Apart from webinars, solving 1-on-1 queries is sometimes fun and sometimes not. When these queries are questions which converts me into a student and requires me to do research, I love it. But sometimes error occurs because the student didn’t follow the process correctly and in these cases narrowing down the problem gets tricky sometimes but it helps learn.
And finally managing and making sure that no one is left behind is probably the greatest challenge according to me at least. This is because everyone hits several roadblocks during their learning process. These roadblocks are different for everyone and they can greatly vary from student to student. But making sure that the student does not loose his/her motivation, curiosity and drive is the most important thing. Overall the experience has been great. I got to learn several new things and interact with amazing students. I’m now mentoring other cohorts. I’m constantly learning and I love it.
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