At some point you get your first student. You open your e-mail (which is mentioned on the mkdev website) and see the message about a new payment. But it doesn’t mean that the subscription period has already started.

What do mentors use to communicate with students?

Mentors must use im.mkdev.me platform to communicate with students. This is the only official place where communication should happen. Mentor is free to use external software for voice calls, but as long as communication is in text form it must be via im.mkdev.me.

By the way, your e-mail about the payment also has all the instructions about what to do next.

Contacting the student and starting the subscription

The subscription period will not be started right away after it’s been paid. We did that so the student wouldn’t lose the paid time just because he decided to pay for it on Saturday night So here’s what you need to do after getting the message that the subscription has been paid:

Before contact

1. Be sure to read the information your student added to the payment message, it might help you understand what exactly the student wants to learn and do.
2. Be sure to look at the student’s profile on the website. It might be that this student had some other mentor before and thus has some necessary feedback or notes from the mentor or mkdev team.
3. Contact them.

First contact

1. Say hello :-)
2. Thoroughly discuss the student’s needs and find out all the information you need.
   1. Workplace? Hometown? Profession?
   2. What days are suitable for studying? Are weekends available? What about office hours?
   3. Any experience in the desirable field? What has been already studied, read and done?
   4. What is the study plan? What are the aims? What is expected after X amount of weeks/months?
3. Along with that, after you’ve started talking with the student, you can enter your profile and start the subscription since you began spending your time on the student.
4. Bearing in mind the answers from the student you can talk about:
   1. Schedule: when the mentor is available, when the student can learn actively, when the student can expect the response (more about it below) and code review
   2. First task: what the student needs to do in the first place. It might be one of our Quests, some practical task or any links to study. Ideally, you should load so much on the student so he or she would be busy for at least 24 hours.

At the first week of studies

1. You need to draw up a study program in the first 7 days of the subscription period. This is compulsory as the paid subscription includes a program. Even if the student paid only for a week and is not ready to extend the subscription, they should have their program by the end of this week.
   1. If goals of the student are in conflict with the need to draw up a study program, then the mentor has to notify Fodoj UG about it via Basecamp.

During the subscription period

Each student has his or her own requirements. Some know nothing about programming. Some want you to help with their main job tasks. Some want to create their own app from scratch. Each student’s level is different, so you can’t just study Quest tasks with everyone. We can’t make a list of everything the mentor needs to do for the student, but the whole process should follow Key mentorship principles. But here’s perhaps the most important advice:

Don’t just wait for the questions from your student.

This is one of the key principles which differs us from other ‘mentorship services’. Any mentor must:

1. Ask questions: a good mentor asks as many questions as the student asks him or her.
2. Discover the student’s weak points.
3. Give extra tasks.
4. Give articles and literature for recommended reading.
5. Be a proactive mentor, not a lazy ass who doesn’t do anything without pressure.

It’s highly important to let your student know that during the subscription period you and your help are always available and you’re ready to answer any questions. Otherwise you might get a message like that:

Well, during those two weeks the mentor was just checking my tasks, nagging at me about the indentations etc.

I didn’t feel any mentorship or support. I was just digging into some material, showing it to the mentor and getting something like ‘You can continue digging or we can go on with something else’ as a response.

-- Real feedback form a frustrated student

Oops. It shouldn’t be like that. Here’s how it should be:

#MentorInsertNameHere is always available! This is pretty close to individual classes. Sometimes it feels like my mentor answers me even faster than I do. #MentorInsertNameHere never gives straight answers to the difficult questions, but sends links to the particular examples or screencasts. They help a lot as they are more like step-by-step instructions than just docs. At the end of each stage I should implement some feature. After I’ve asked all the questions and think that I’ve done a good job, I get a code review from #MentorInsertNameHere and understand that much is still to be done.

-- Real feedback from a happy student

Another example:

Let me say about mentorship! Three key points in my opinion: 1) #MentorInsertNameHere explains everything with layman’s terms (! This is important, as the explanation might be difficult!) 2) The mentor pays attention to the key aspect of the task, tries to scrutinize the matter thoroughly, not only answer straight answers 3) The mentor broadens the horizons of the student concerning different technologies, ways to develop, things the employer might need, future plans etc.

-- Another real feedback from a happy student

Any mentor should be as interested is sharing his or her knowledge as any student is interested in getting such knowledge. Maybe even more. We usually get students who asked for our help because they aren’t motivated enough to study by themselves, so they expect a mentor to be more enthusiastic and active. That’s why you’d better not wait for a student to take an active part, do that yourself.

Response and code review time

On average our students wait for a code review for less than three hours and get an answer in the chat immediately. If for some reason a mentor doesn’t answer for a day and we get a complaint from a student, we usually prolong the subscription period by one day. Mentorship is rather expensive, so students usually expect particular care and all the answers they need.

For us a code review is a real, highly detailed, relevant to the real work review of all the code from the student. You need to be so careful with the code review, as if it was the review of the code from your Junior colleague who created a Pull Request for your main project.

Don’t be scared, the ones who bombard mentors with questions 24/7 are rather rare. The students know that mentorship is not the mentors’ main job, which is easy to guess having a look at the mentorship price. So if it takes you 30-40 minutes to reply, that’s okay.

What to do if the student is problematic or is not happy with the service

You should forward the student’s complaint to us using the support form, ‘Ask the question’ form on the website or to team@mkdev.me. We usually don’t make refunds but try to find another solution: choose some other mentor, prolong the subscription etc. Our main guard is Alexey, with the occasional help from Kirill and Leonid. Our job is to deal with conflicts and make everybody (but first and foremost our students) happy.

How many students to teach

The personal experience of some of our mentors has demonstrated that it’s extremely difficult to have a full-time job and more than 10 students at the same time. But if you consider the mentorship as your main job and don’t have another one which takes 40+ hours a week, you can have even 30, if you please. But remember, that quality should be over quantity. If you understand that you can’t continue at the same pace anymore, you can change your availability in the Office. Only mentor can decide how many students he or she wants to have at a time. Both ‘Just 1 person at a time’ or ‘As many as possible’ are fine.

How to get feedback from the student

After two weeks of mentorship your student gets an opportunity to leave feedback. You can remind him or her about it, but our mkdev team does it anyway.