Fall '20 Lecture Notes - Wed Aug 19 - Mentor Matchmaking

Today was a bit of a dumpster fire. I won’t post a recording, because it would be of little value. But I’ll summarize what little we accomplished below.

Announcements

• I added a Piazza site; you should have been added and notified.
• I have office hours available now on Tuesdays from 10a-12p. (See my UNC site for a signup link.)
• Is everybody OK with me posting recordings on YouTube? In general, I like for others to be able to benefit from my lectures. And I try to be careful not to compromise student privacy. Your videos are off, and I only ever say first names (and no names for private chat messages). But if you’re uncomfortable with that, let me know.
• If you’re moving out of a dorm in the next week and need to miss a lecture, let me know—that’ll be excused.
• Remember that Assignment 1: Project Management Board is due Sunday (soft deadline) or by the time you meet with your mentor (hard deadline).

Teams/Projects have been assigned!

• you can see them on the projects page
• most people got a high preference
• lowest project-priority match: 1 submission got their 4th preference (2x 3rd, 2x 2nd, 12x 1st)
• no teams were broken up for team-priority preferences
• lowest team-priority match: 1 submission got their 8th preference (1x 7th, 1x 5th, 3x 4th, 3x 3rd, 3x 2nd, 4x 1st)
• to reduce the possibility of my unconscious bias affecting assignments, I didn’t see names of projects, clients, or students when matchmaking

Mentor matchmaking

For most of the rest of lecture, everybody was in a breakout room with their team.

The goal was to get one submission per team of which mentor times the team was available for. When I had all of that data, I could assign teams to mentors.

Problems

• There were some technical difficulties with the meeting. I changed the settings so that students could join only with an @email.unc.edu address. (Before, it was any *.unc.edu address.) I did this because I wanted to use pre-assigned breakout rooms (one per team), and apparently that was the way to do it. I hoped this wouldn’t affect anybody, but it did, and we spent 15 minutes wrestling with it, trying to get everybody in.
• It took longer than expected to get the last team submission in. All teams but one were reasonably fast, but 1 team was significantly longer, and I couldn’t start scheduling until I had all the data.
• The actual scheduling took longer than expected. I had some automation techniques in place (including an availability matrix in Google Sheets), but other parts of the process were manual and slow.
• I finished scheduling but there were still 2 teams unscheduled. I forgot that we are currently short by 2 mentors.

Next up

• We’ll talk about project management, like I wanted to do during lecture.