Engaging Alumni Mentors in Software Engineering Project Courses

Getting alumni effectively engaged as mentors with students is a topic that is of great interest to universities but often hard to do in practice. We have found that with proper structure and support, software project courses provide a good avenue to make these connections between alumni and student and that alumni input can improve the quality of outcomes in these project courses. In this poster the authors describe the alumni mentoring process and how it has evolved over the past three years. In addition, we have begun to collect data from both student teams and alumni to answer three questions: (1) what information are alumni sharing with student teams? (2) is a student team's perception of what was said matching up well with the mentor's perception?, (3) are student teams able to convert alumni feedback into actionable project items?, and (4) at what phase in a software engineering project are alumni mentors most effective? The poster will demonstrate the details of our mentoring process and display our preliminary findings in a colorful fashion convenient to allow others to assess for themselves the potential value of using alumni mentors in software project courses.