# CodePath SE10x Mentor Guide

CodePath's SE10x courses are designed to help students ace technical interviews and give them a preview of the tech industry. This includes weekly lectures from instructors, coding challenges, mock interviews, and panels with industry experts. The course concludes with students participating in a Virtual Career Fair with over 50 companies to interview for internship and full time positions.

Your goal as a mentor is to support students through their 12 week journey in this course and ensure their success by:
- Participating and helping provide feedback during class as they work on coding challenges
- Checking in with students on Slack periodically and helping them stay motivated and engaged throughout the summer
- Helping answer any questions students may have for you about the tech industry in general

## Expectations from mentors

### Before the first session:
- Review the [UMPIRE process](https://guides.codepath.com/compsci/UMPIRE-Interview-Strategy) that we have developed to give students a concrete framework towards solving coding questions.

The most common mistakes we see students making during coding interviews is jumping into code too quickly and not communicating with the interviewer enough as they solve the problem. In developing the UMPIRE process, our goal was to help students avoid these mistakes and have a plan on how to approach problem solving.

We refer to and use the UMPIRE process in every session, so it's critical that mentors have a solid foundation and understanding of it.

### Before each Saturday session:
- Review the solution guide for the upcoming session in the [course portal](https://courses.codepath.com/). Make sure you:
- Understand the problems students will be working on including any constraints or clarifying requirements students may ask about.
- Understand the solutions to each problem. There are usually multiple solutions for a problem and you should be aware of each solution and their tradeoffs so that you can discuss them with students.
- Understand how to provide hints if students become stuck on a certain part of the problem.

### During each session:

In the second half of each session, students will be going into small 'breakout rooms' with 4-5 other students. As a group, they will be working through coding challenges or giving each other mock interviews. As their mentor, you will be in the breakout room with them and your role will be to:
- Help faciliate discussion
- Do students have their cameras on?
- Being able to see the other students in the room oftens helps make this virtual session less awkward and more personal.
- Are students engaging with their group?
- There should not be any prolonged silences over 2-3 minutes. If there are, ask how you can help answer any questions that may be blocking them.
- Is everybody getting a chance to participate?
- Help ensure that nobody is dominating the discussion, and conversely, that nobody is not talking at all.
- Help students who are stuck are a problem
- Often times students may not have a good idea on how to proceed in a problem. In this situation, try to provide hints without giving the next step away. For example, you can provide hints such as:
- Is there a particular type of tree traversal that we can use to help us with this problem?
- Would it help us solve the problem if the array was sorted?
- How would that approach work with x input?
- This can help them understand potential flaws in their solution without pointing out the bug directly
- Ensure students aren't working through the problems "too fast" and skipping crucial steps
- Students are often eager to solve as many problems as possible. This can lead to them missing important steps such as:
- Not asking enough clarifying questions before trying to come up with a solution
- Not considering alternative approaches to a problem and the tradeoffs for each approach
- Not verifying that their algorithm will work correctly by tracing through it with example inputs
- Not considering edge cases
- The solution guides provide 'checkpoints' for you to verify as the students work through a problem. This helps both you and the student make sure that the right questions have been considered and answered before moving on to the next step of the problem.
- Help verify that students' solutions are correct and that they have reached the most optimal solution in terms of time and space complexity

### After each session:
After the session it's a good idea to check in with the students to see if they are still struggling with anything covered during the week.

If you notice that a student was not present during the session, you should message them to check in and make sure they are still engaged with the course. If they seem to be losing interest or motivation, try to see if there's anything you can do to help or if there's any extra support that they need in order to succeed in the course.

### Structure of the course

Class is held twice a week:
- Tuesday nights (6-8pm Pacific time)
- Saturday mornings (10am-12pm Pacific time)

**Format for Session #1:**
Session #1 is more flexible because there won't be mentors we need to coordinate times with. Generally, it's great to break up the session with 2 group exercises so that students can have a break from lectures.

Sample schedule
- Overview of the weekly topic, discuss most important things
- Group exercises #1
- Cover a nontechnical topic or go through a walkthrough
- Group exercises #2

**Format for Session #2:**
- Question walkthrough (20-30 minutes)
- Break out room sessions with mentors (40-60 minutes)
- Review questions from break out sessions, wrap the week up (~10-20 minutes)

The week concludes with students taking a 90 minute HackerRank assessment that includes questions covering the topic of the week. The HackerRank assessment usually contains a few multiple choice questions and 2-3 coding questions.