14 Your mentor

Your mentor is a professional software engineer from one of the employers listed here: Airbus, Airnode, Alphabet (Google), AND Digital, Apadmi, Apple, ARM, Auto Trader UK, Barclays, the BBC, Bet365, Beyond Trust, Biorelate, BJSS, Blaize, Bloomberg, Booking.com, Brightec, CERN, CDL Software, Cisco, Codat, CodeThink, Code Computer Love, Cognizant, Couchbase, Cubic Motion (now Epic Games), DAI, DataCentred, Digital Bridge Ltd, Disney Streaming, EGN Digital, Farm Digital, Giant Digital, Goldman Sachs, IBM, Interact Software, Ivanti, Koder.ly, Matillion, MediaTek, Meta (Facebook), Microsoft, Moonpig, Morgan Stanley, Nandos, NCC Group, On The Beach, Peak.ai, Push Doctor, Rental Cars, Sainsburys, Sage Group plc, Shout Platform Limited, Roku, Siemens (Mentor Graphics), SKY, Slalom, Spotify, SteamaCo, The Startup Factory, Tanglewood Games, THG, ThoughtWorks, Tranzfar, UK Parliament, UL, Unipart Digital and Zuhlke.

Your mentor will meet your team twice on Zoom during the mentoring sessions on Thursdays. They can help you understand how what you’re learning on this course relates to software engineering in the real world. They can guide you on the process and the politics of your software engineering project.

Mentors have volunteered their time to help you, so make sure you ask them lots of questions, some suggested questions are shown in section 13.6.3 if you need some inspiration.

It makes your mentors job a lot easier if you turn your camera on, see section 0.9

14.1 Introducing your team

Both you and your mentor will get more out of your meeting if you introduce yourselves as a team beforehand. This requires that one of you collates team information and emails the mentor before the meeting. We suggest the following as an example and template:

from: flo.ting-point@student.manchester.ac.uk
to: $mentors-email
cc: neil; pen; peter; marge; polly; etc
subject:  Hello from Team X at the University of Manchester


Dear $mentors-name (or $mentors-names)

We'd like to introduce ourselves before our team meeting.

We are team $team-number

Our team members (modify as needed) include:

* neil.pointer@student.manchester.ac.uk
* pen.tester@student.manchester.ac.uk
* peter.byte@student.manchester
* marge.conlict@student.manchester.ac.uk
* rick.urshion@student.manchester.ac.uk
* polly.morphism@student.manchester.ac.uk
* etc

We look forward to meeting you on $date at $time on Zoom.

Best wishes

Florence Ting-Point
(On behalf of team X)
University of Manchester

You could (optionally) add more information about yourselves to help your mentor get to know you:

Our team members (modify as needed) include:

* neil.pointer@student.manchester.ac.uk likes C
* pen.tester@student.manchester.ac.uk likes cybersecurity
* peter.byte@student.manchester likes big data
* marge.conlict@student.manchester.ac.uk likes version control
* rick.urshion@student.manchester.ac.uk likes functional programming
* polly.morphism@student.manchester.ac.uk likes O.O.P.
* etc

14.2 But I’m not interested in employer x?

If you are lucky, your mentor from employer \(x\) will just happen to be working in a role or a sector that you are interested in.

If they’re not, you can still learn lots from them. Software engineering is converging on standard practices which means you can learn a huge amount from our mentors, even if you’re not especially interested in the employer they work for.

The way that high quality software is built in different industries is remarkably similar, from banks to technology companies and from e-commerce companies to consumer electronics.