MentorCircle

MentorCircle is the new way of being a mentee and mentor in a circular way and share our knowledge & experience. Back to Hacking means back to MLH & MentorCircle helps the new hackers by new mentors.

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Inspiration

Are you an early talent who struggles to navigate and progress in your career journey? Do you feel intimidating signing up for a mentorship program not knowing what you should do? Do you ever struggle to find a mentor who connects with your experience and advices you into the right path?

Don't worry, MentorCircle is here for you.

MentorCircle is inspired by a roundtable conversation among early talents. The founders empathized by everyone's journey and inspired to create a robust mentorship network. Instead of a define role of mentor or mentee, we are a bigger believer in creating an open roundtable for peers to share what they excel in and seek guidance on what they need.

With MentorCircle as the centralize mentorship resource hub, you will be able to build a tailored career network with little downtime and only a few clicks away.

What it does

MentorCircle is a professional social networking platform design to create a virtual mentorship roundtable among college graduates and early industry talents.

Users can sign up and set up their profile outlining their experience and mentorship expectation they are seeking for. Once the profile is set up, the algorithm will recommend and pre-match connections that suit best to the user’s profile.

To engage knowledge sharing and transfer, there is a point system to encourage contribution. User can earn points through mentoring others, answering open forum questions, participating in activities, or donating to charities.

In order to participating in a one-on-one mentorship, user will have to collect sufficient points to do so. Mentees can submit request to begin a mentorship with their desired mentor with a simple application. There will be recommended prompt and guidance for mentors and mentees to reference to during the process. Additional post mentorship functionality such as reference letter template and custom feedback summary are also available to create action plans and journal the learnings in the mentorship.

How we built it

Our project was an output of one full round of design thinking and MVP implementation. We started by brainstorming on the problem statement and then exploring the solution space using Mural. Then using Figma, we started to build an interactive UX prototype based on the prioritized features from our design thinking sessions.

A parallel task was to register our domain and setup a Bucket in Google Cloud Storage. Then we setup our domain to be connected to the IP of our Bucket.

Next day part of team have started to export CSS and UI elements from the Figma and add proper JavaScript codes and edit the exported HTML, to have a working prototype on the cloud storage which is also accessible from our dedicated domain. In parallel the other part of the team worked together to design our logo using Adobe Illustrator and prepare the presentation story line.

The last step was working on the video and writing this description.

Challenges we ran into

Here are a couple challenges we ran into:

  • Prototyping under 48 hours: Our team had lots of interesting idea to implement, but given we have to work around with international time zone. We were three people from Canada and one from Germany.
  • Finding a collaboration method: Our first challenge was how to be sync and collaborate despite the work from home challenges and Time zone differences. First we used Mural for brainstorming parts and then tried to pipeline all tasks to use most of our available time in the best order.
  • New tools to use: The time pressure also caused to use some new tools. Using Google Cloud, register domain from GoDaddy, and exporting a website from Figma using pure JavaScript (instead of ReacJS) were some of those new challenging situations.
  • Less developer than designer: It was a challenge which we tried to turn to an opportunity. We had only one developer and made it hard for us to develop further. But in the other hand it helped us to enrich our design and marketing.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are happy that we are able to complete the idea of MentorCircle under 48 hours and challenging time zone. With the pressure we are working under, our team is proud that we are ready to present the first prototype and ideation.

Finding a best match pipeline for our tasks and using most of our available hours in the best order (based our expertise) was also a great achievement that at the beginning we couldn’t believe we are capable of.

What we learned

First, we learned how to make a team in short time and try to listen to every voice in the team as much as we can. We learned how to respect limitations that each of us can face during these two days and everyone just try his/her best to help the team.

Secondly, we learned to use bunch of new tools and new ways to propose a helpful idea for a demanding problem.

What's next for MentorCircle

We hope to seek for continue progression and support on MentorCircle. The next of this will be developing a beta functional website and application. We truly believe that our solution has the capacity to help lots of people around the globe and have a positive impact in our society.

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