<aside> 🚨 This page is outdated! Our new page on mentorship can be found here.

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TL;DR

• Constrained by qualified mentorship capacity, OSP aims to provide established EA groups with tailored support to help them plan for their semester and troubleshoot problems;

• In most cases, mentors should have experience with community-building strategy and running university groups;

• This is different from UGAP mentoring because the substance and amount of support will be more variable based on a group’s experience level and particular challenges and opportunities; It will also include more experienced groups.

• Time periods for pairing will range from late-December to around May, with specific dates determine by mentor availability. If you’re only free some parts of this range, that’s fine!

• Mentors will be [tentatively] compensated for their time and we think this could have a big positive impact in expectation in helping EA uni groups go well;

• If you are interested, please fill out this form by 5:00pm ET November 20, 2022.

  <aside> ⏲️ We are no longer making active matches but we encourage you to fill out the interest form if you may be interested in mentoring in the future

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What is the Organizer Support Program?

OSP is a new pilot that CEA’s groups team is running this upcoming semester to provide existing EA uni groups with mentorship and advice.

We think the playbook for established EA groups is currently pretty underdeveloped. This means that, at the current margin, providing more tailored mentorship and guidance to group organizers at established groups seems to be a better strategy. This intuition has been strengthened by the fact that organizers at more established groups have reported mentorship as the most useful component of UGAP for them.

We anticipate being constrained by mentor capacity and we cannot commit to offering mentorship to everyone who is interested in receiving it. Instead, we plan to prioritize offerings based on our analysis of who could benefit most from mentorship.

For groups that we are able to support outside of UGAP, we expect the range of the OSP will provide will span a pretty wide range. By default, we anticipate suggesting one of these four types of mentorship to most groups:

• Semester Planning - this mentorship will involve 2-3 calls to help groups prepare for their semester and to support them to implement their plans at the beginning of the semester. Mentors will go over a version of this planning doc with their mentees before the semester starts and then have 1-2 follow-up calls with groups near the beginning of the semester to check-in and course correct as needed. We anticipate this being by far the most common version of mentorship we suggest to groups.
• On-going support - this will involve having regular calls with groups (weekly or bi-weekly) to help them strategize, trouble-shoot, and plan. We anticipate this type of support being useful for especially high-potential groups who want and need more support.
• In-depth strategy review - this will involve going through a strategic review process with groups over the course of the semester and guiding them to plan their activities over a longer-time span (i.e. rather than planning for the semester it will mean planning for on-going strategic prioritization). We anticipate this involving 2-3 calls over the course of the semester and being calibrated to being most useful for really promising and advanced groups.
• Special projects - We think it is possible that a few groups would benefit from a more specifically tailored type of mentorship and we want to keep this possibility open. It is very possible that this won’t happen at all this semester, but we want to be open to the chance that this is what makes most sense.