Ken

Ada as Mentor

 
In early 2016, Ada decided to take on a summer intern to help prototype her vision for a new Switch Access feature. Ada had never hosted an intern before. The plan was for Ada and her intern to work side by side, implementing the new feature, with Ada sharing her software engineering expertise with the intern.
 
In February, we interviewed an intern candidate named Sarah. It was obvious right away that Ada and Sarah were a great personality match. Sarah respected Ada’s talent and experience, and appreciated Ada’s sense of humor. Ada could see that Sarah was a capable student, and also had a pleasant easy-going personality.
 
Sarah started working with Ada in May, and I met with Ada at least weekly. Perhaps partly as a result of using Dasher for communication, Ada developed a powerful skill of concise purposeful speech. She didn’t waste words. On June 6, at the very beginning of Saray’s internship, Ada told me, “I’m a little scared. With my speed of doing things, Sarah is always waiting for me.”  Adults often have trouble admitting they are scared. They try to “tough it out” without help, but Ada knew that opening up to people often helps overcome problems. We decided I would ask Sarah about this.
 
We were both relieved to learn that Sarah actually didn’t feel at all slowed down by the interaction, and was quite happy working with Ada. But knowing Ada’s concern, to improve communication we set up a remote desktop so Ada and Sarah could share their screen, and Ada could interact with Sarah without the feeling of physically looking over her shoulder.
 
Ada and Sarah made a lot of progress, but both were relatively new to Android programming and needed to find a way to do a certain kind of animation. There were many options and the right path wasn’t clear. Ada again started to doubt her own ability as an intern host, and felt that she should know all the answers in advance. Again, Ada was willing to express her concern, which made it possible to talk it through. In discussion, Ada realized that her role was to help Sarah explore the options, and that for an internship to be interesting, it wouldn’t be possible to know everything in advance.
 
By the end of the summer, it was clear that Ada had risen to the challenge of mentoring an intern to work on a challenging new feature. We all learned a lot that summer, and in the end the code was working and Ada reported that it was cleaner than she expected!  At the end of August, Ada said, “Sarah’s internship was great. It made me want to come to work every day.”