Last year all of the second year fellows benefitted from the mentorship provided by the second year students. My mentor was Amanda Morton and throughout the year she offered assistance in the various divisions, especially when I began on the PressForward Project in the Spring and Summer of 2014. In addition, Spencer Roberts helped us on various projects and his support throughout the year was invaluable.

This year I’ve had the opportunity to mentor Stephanie Seal. We’ve jointly produced the Digital Campus Podcast several times and I’ve offered her assistance on projects when she has needed it. The new cohort’s first rotation this year was in Research and for the first few weeks they worked on PessForward. As the digital fellow positioned on the PressForward project, I assisted in helping them set up their own WordPress blogs on the dev server, showed them how the plugin worked, and guided them through being both Editors-At-Large and Editors-In-Chief.

During the second semester each fellow was placed in a division. Jordan Bratt came to research and worked with us on PressForward. One project he spearheaded was learning R to scrape and download some Editor’s Choice pieces for a mapping/text mining project. I was able to take some time this semester to work with him to write some “if” statements in R since I am somewhat familiar with the language. He’s done an amazing job on the project and its been fun to watch him further develop his skills and do some interesting things with the DHNow data.

Aside from working with the first years on PressForward and with Stephanie on Digital Campus we’ve also used our roles as mentors to help out in the Support Space. During the fellows time in Clio II, I’ve assisted several students with things like learning the 960 grid (an easy way to quickly structure the layout of a site) and troubleshooting code. I think the mentorship program is very useful in the sense that it brings the two cohorts together across projects and promotes collaboration. Being stationed on one project has meant that I always have things to do aside from fellowship responsibilities. The mentorship program has allowed me to take time to work with Stephanie and the others through both the support space and collaborative projects like producing Digital Campus.