I'm hiring for a special role at The School for Social Design.

Basics

You'll be a kind of guidance counsellor or guide for students, helping them customize their path through our Practices and Methods, based on their learning style, projects, and strengths and weaknesses—and monitoring their progress to make sure something happens if they're struggling.

Pay

Pay is US$650/student you take on, and we expect each student to take up about 10h total of your time, spread out over 2-3 months. So each student is an add'l ~1h/week. In practice, some weeks a student will take 2h of your time and others 0h.

You are paid as the student reaches milestones over their 3-month journey.
You can choose how many students to take on at a time. We recommend starting with two. Because it’s more efficient and energizing for the students to have meetings with another student with them.

What Do Guides Do?

They Care. Most importantly, the guide is someone who cares about how a student is doing. They worry if they're stuck. This means you should be a highly relational person: someone who focuses on individuals rather than on "community", groups, "brands", "projects", etc. You should derive meaning from caring for people—finding the perfect gift, bringing someone soup or helping them get unstuck.
They Solve Person-Puzzles: puzzles about how a student can have a breakthrough.

There are three big kind of reality changing shifts that happen for each of our students. But different people will have these shifts in different contexts and with different setups. We don't practice a heavy handed, super intense, kind of transformative process. There's no psychedelics there's there's nothing like this. But nonetheless, some of these changes in perspective lead people to change their whole lives around and certainly also the way they build their products. The shifts are the same for each of our students. Although occasionally we have a student who's already had one of the shifts and then they only need to add a three or something. The shifts are the same, but the conditions which will allow each student to go through this shift are different they may need different kinds of social support, different kinds of background reading, and so on. And so part of what the guy does is they have deep insight into what kinds of conditions will help each of these students go through each of these shifts. And this is a kind of puzzle that involves a lot of empathy and understanding of individuals and how they're
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- Connoisseur of character. This person has a good mental model of people very different than themselves—they are very aware of individual differences. They give gifts, for example, that are customized for the receiver—gifts few others would like. In your role at The School for Social Design, you'll need to intuit which students will learn best with one approach versus another: who learns intuitively/experientially? Who does better with formal definitions? Who learns best in a social context? Who alone? Who wants to be seduced into learning? Who wants to be challenged? Who needs to be immersed? To test your intuition in this regard, try thinking through some friends of yours and guessing their their ideal learning environment.
create urgency in the learning process. By urgency, I mean, the guide needs to understand enough of the students social life and dreams and plans. That they can figure out how to teach as much of the course as possible in situations where the student is urgently motivated to learn it, because they're their plans, or next steps in their relationships depend on learning those things. For example, take Miho. she was in charge of making a grant funding process on a Caribbean island. She's going to spend two weeks on the island to learn as much as possible about the situation of the people that we're currently but how grants are currently funded and what people thought would be ideal. We arranged to teach her our values interview process, just in time one of our guides gave her the introduction to it the following day, the following two days. She had practice interviews lined up with some of her best friends and colleagues. And the day after that, she flew to the Caribbean island. So she was very motivated to learn the interview technique on Wednesday, because she knew she would need it on Thursday and Friday with her friends and then the next week for her job. The guide tries to schedule as much of the course as possible in this manner to create an urgent drive to learn. So the students are incredibly attentive and motivated.
create solidarity. When possible, students move through the course in groups of two or three or four and are helping each other learn and helping each other ideate. students perform these kinds of solidarities should be well matched either at a similar level or with mutual things that they can teach each other. Students should feel they're on a great journey with someone they are grateful to have as a companion on that journey. And then along the way they in their companion will meet many other beautiful people that they would like to keep in their lives. Everyone is bonded over the same devotion to the cause of making spaces rather than files and tubes on Earth values and spending database design
- They Match-Make. make connections. The guide is not an expert. Usually, in the problem domain, the students working in so student is working in cohousing. They may not have a guide, who's done. Designed cohousing projects students working in making an app the guide may not have a dating app. The guide probably won't have made a dating app. This means but but we have a broad network of people who have done all these things. And part of the job of the guide is to connect the student with domain experts this means the guide should be good at learning over time about our alumni network, and who's good at who and who would like who is good at having this kind of matchmaker mentality and enjoys it. ALSO we often want to put the student in contact with a master of one of the skills we teach and this also isn't is often will be somebody else besides the guide. And so the student will make those kinds of matches to the guide will make those kinds of matches. On the job, you'll become personally familiar with a network of amazing people you'll send your students to.

Skills Needed

This is a job very few people would be good at. The ideal candidate is an intellectual who is (1) highly relational, (2) a connoisseur ****of character, and (3) quick to confront problems.

ready for quality assurance
learning by failing. i know I’m going to fail, but I’m going to learn.
they need to really understand their own limits. Because we are teaching something that has no one. There's there that it's similar to teaching an academic field like sociology or something where there's no mastery some of this the guide is the students will often ask questions, the student will often ask questions to the guide. But half the time the right approach is for the guide to refer the student on to someone else immediately. The guides should never bullshit the student or tell them what they think. Or guess or at least not often. But should say Ah, that question is out of my depth but this other person X would be really good at that. And if the guy doesn't know who that other person X is. They can ask around within our organization and they're sure to get an answer for their student. They're sure to get someone to pass their student on to so the guide needs to know their own limits.
Quick to confront. Finally, one of your most important tasks will be to eject students that won't do well as early as possible and to be clear and upfront about how your student might struggle. You should be able to cut to the chase with strangers, to acknowledge difficult things and talk about them quickly. You should recognize when your plan for a student isn't working, and be ready to begin again a different way. You should not just be patient when things don't work out—you should be quick to suspect that things may not be working out. You should think "is any of these 10 things likely to go wrong with this person this week?" instead of waiting for things to blow up.
Beware. guiding is a very difficult job there will be situations that you're bad bad at quite regularly. Even if you're very good at all the above there will be difficult students that you don't know how to teach. You will sometimes give assignments. It turned out to be the wrong choice for the student but they don't like they're not excited about there will be student projects where seeing clearly how the student can benefit from the course. And what the best way to weave the course in their project together is will be difficult and require a lot of investigation brainstorming. Seeking of advice for all these reasons for obvious reasons it's best if you feel very strong, the components of the job. Few have a history of solving these kinds of puzzles, matchmaking, understanding how different different people are and what they need. Maybe even creating transformative experiences that are just right for a particular person to blossom or grow. If you have a strong background in all of the parts of this and you feel good at them individually then putting them all together in the role of a guide will still be a bitch but it will be manageable. Putting it all together will still be overwhelming at times.

Training

You’ll need to become familiar with HS methodology and curriculum, and especially with naming values. If you're not good at this yet, you'll need to get trained before you start. It's quite nerdy.