UX Academy: Mentorship
|
|
|
|
This article covers everything you need to know about mentorship during your UX Academy course. Questions covered in this article: |
|
|
|
|
How does mentorship work?
Your mentor acts as your design coach, answering design questions, helping you with your portfolio, and giving you career advice and tips on things like time management. They will also give tactical feedback, critique your submissions, and help you develop your skills.
Before the course begins, each student fills out a short pre-course survey, where we collect more information on your background and post-course goals. We use this information, along with your location (we have mentors all over the world), to pair you up with mentors who'd be a good match.
UX Academy mentorship switch request
We’re proud of our diverse student and mentor community, but we’re all humans, and sometimes we just don’t click, whether on a personal level or in terms of how we see the world.
1) Give your mentor a fair shot.
There is a lot more to someone's background if you take the time to speak with them, and every mentor brings something unique to the table. All of our mentors have been thoroughly vetted, so you can rest assured that all of our mentors have the required experience and skills to guide you through the course. You can view more information here about our vetting process.
2) Make sure you schedule and attend your first mentor call.
This is a good opportunity for you to respectfully set expectations with your mentor on what you want to get out of the course, and what works best for you in terms of feedback (i.e. do you prefer a more direct mentorship style or a more nurturing approach?)
3) Communicate and problem solve.
If you have any concerns about your mentorship experience (for example, you would like for them to provide more resources in their feedback), it's important to respectfully keep open communication about these things. Our mentors are there to encourage your growth as a designer and are willing to adjust their approach to make sure you are getting the support you need, but they first need to be made aware of your specific learning needs.
If you have done all of the above but would still like to request a new mentor, contact the Support Team. If your request is related to scheduling issues, contact the Support Team immediately!
If your mentor has been unresponsive, it's important to keep in mind that mentors are busy working professionals who mentor in addition to full-time jobs. However, we do set an expectation that they should respond within 48 hours of you uploading work.
Depending on their working pattern, mentors may also choose not to respond over the weekend. When you first meet your mentor, you could check with them whether you can expect to receive feedback at weekends.
Note that you can always find your mentor’s contact information within your dashboard on the right-hand side, and we’d encourage you to communicate directly with them in the first instance.
If you haven’t heard back from your mentor within the expected timeframe, please let us know and we’ll help sort things out!
Sessions with your mentor
Sessions are most valuable when you show up engaged, with an idea of what you'd like to get out of your time with your mentor.
We strongly recommend that you come prepared to each session with a clear outline of topics you'd like to cover—perhaps notes about questions that came up during the week, specific projects you'd like to look at, or design topics you'd like more guidance on. Have fun!
Out of respect for your mentor’s time, if you need to cancel or reschedule a session, you must give your mentor at least 24 hours' notice. Failure to do so will result in the session being forfeited and counted towards your session limit with that mentor (for the purposes of this tuition reimbursement requirement, a forfeited session does not count as an attended session).
- Canceled: this means you canceled with at least 24 hours notice, and you will be able to reschedule the session with your mentor.
- Forfeited: this means you did not cancel with at least 24 hours' notice, and you will not be able to make up this session with your mentor.
To cancel or postpone a session, follow these steps:
- Log into your account
- On the right-hand side, click "View Session" for the one that you'd like to cancel
- If you are canceling with at least 24 hours notice, choose to either reschedule or cancel session
When you book a session with a mentor, they are allocating time for you in their professional schedule. Out of respect for their time and other commitments, we don’t expect mentors to reschedule sessions if the student cancels less than 24 hours beforehand, or if their student fails to attend the session..
If you’re informed that a session has been forfeited, that means that you canceled the call less than 24 hours beforehand, and it can’t be rescheduled.
If you think there’s been a mistake or misunderstanding with regard to the forfeited session, please write to us here and we’ll look into it for you.