Outsourcing Innovation: Building an Industry-Academic Mentorship Collaboration

Uh, with that, might as well get started. So, thanks so much for taking the time to sit and listen to my presentation today. Uh, my name is Stephanie and like Christa said, I'm going to be talking about outsourcing innovation and the industry academic sync. So, just as an open note as I'm getting started here, uh, this talk is going to cover my own opinions and reflections on creating a mentorship collaboration between one company and one university. Uh these findings may not extend to every program or every university, but I'd love to share what I've learned so that if this is something that you're passionate about, uh you could potentially implement it at your company. So with all of that, I just want to give a quick overview uh of a little bit about me and what I do. So I am a user experience researcher at Verizon Connect and I've been in this role for just shy of 5 years at this point. Uh I like most employees at Verizon Connect support our main product called Reveal and Reveal is a businessto business fleet telematics tool. The long and short of that is that our company installs hardware into fleet vehicles and then that hardware sends information to software that the fleet manager can use to just understand their fleet better. Uh diagnostics uh things like that. And uh my area of research has to do with all things safety related. So dash cams are something we can install in vehicles and those dash cams can send videos of dangerous driving events or accidents to fleet managers. That's the kind of thing that I would be researching. Uh and also things like driver safety scores. Uh but really just the day-to-day needs of a fleet or safety manager as well as any other topic in the safety domain. Uh I also really love mentorship. Uh it's something that I've been passionate about for as long as I can remember. Uh but really became one of my big things I wanted to do more of when I was in both college postgrad and then now uh as a UX researcher at Verizon. Uh and then one other nice icebreaker that I thought would be a nice intro for me is this idea of my work superpower. It's something we talked about at work a couple months ago. Um, and the idea of a work superpower is something you bring to the table at your work without expending any energy. You just love doing those things. And for me, I really like to mix and match my personal hobbies with professional work. Uh, to give some examples, back when co was really limiting uh human interaction at work, uh we were in need of remote team building exercises. Uh, and I brought my love of escape rooms to the virtual worlds, made an escape room for my team and did that as team building. Uh, I also really love Dungeons and Dragons, and some of the roleplay elements of that translated super nicely into dog fooding exercises at work. Uh, I enjoy writing as a hobby, and that obviously translates into UX storytelling. and then my general passion for academia and college courses translated very nicely into the professional mentorship that I'm going to be talking about today. So with that we can get into the topic itself and I wanted to open with a question to the room of whether or not some of these sentiments might sound familiar to you. Things like there will be no internships this year. Team sizes have shrunk at the company but workloads are only increasing. We're just not in a position to hire on more junior level roles right now. And there are a lot of mentors, but not very many mentees. Now, these are things you might hear from your company, but what about that LinkedIn post or that article online that says AI is eliminating the entry-level position and it's just a really rough job market? Or maybe this generation sends out 500 applications but still can't find a job. This is a sentiment that has kind of been persistent in the industry for a few years. Uh, specifically, imagine me in 2024, a UX researcher at Verizon who was really, really passionate about mentorship and wanted to do more with her team and always envisioned herself as being a mentor for interns at the company. Now, we didn't have any interns. And because of this environment and everything I was hearing online, I was losing hope that I was going to be able to be a mentor for well into my career. And then I received a message on LinkedIn from an old professor at Georgia Tech who asked, "Would you like to be an industry partner for a graduate level course that I'm teaching?" And I want to set the stage here to talk a little bit about why this idea excited me so much. So I am a Georgia Tech graduate. Uh I was there as an undergraduate and then as a postgrad in my MS of human computer interaction. Uh and I graduated in about 2021. And I actually took the course that this professor is talking about here uh from the same professor. So what is this course? It's a course that I actually really loved and it's called foundational research methods. It is a fall semester course and is one of the first courses that students take when they become uh master students in this program. And what makes this course so exciting is that it is more than just a project-based course. It is a course that invites industry partners to pitch the projects that the students are going to be working on over the course of the semester. So to give an example uh in August because this is a fall course uh an industry partner will come in and say students I want you to explore this core user need uh and design a solution that improves our customers experience in XYZ ways and then from there uh the students are going to through a combination of their prof their uh project coursework and then industry advice from the partner over the course of the semester uh they are going to do a variation of the double diamond approach to output a mid to highfidelity uh prototype that addresses the concerns of the industry partners prompt. And on the right here you can see there is a Jamba app. Uh that is the output from my experience taking the course uh back in 2019. Uh and this course was so so fun because it all project based courses can be really enjoyable for students. It's your first step into the NSHCI program. It's your first take at foundational research. And the course is designed to be able to have you leave this course with the research and design skills to follow through with the full UX process. But with all of that, you're also doing it with an industry partner. And that, in my opinion, was one of the coolest things about this course. And that wasn't just my opinion. That was also the opinion of most of the cohort that I spoke to when I was in the program. And then years later, it's still something we talk about. And that's something that I really, really want to hit home is that industry experience in the classroom is extremely valuable for students. When you're in a program like this, you've already spent so much time applying to the program. You got accepted and now you're taking these graduate level courses so that you can get an internship and eventually a full-time position. Now you get to have that industry experience simply by showing up to class. And there's a ton of benefits that students can get from this from proving their work can adapt to industry standards from the get-go without even having an internship. Uh they can also do a little bit of breaking into that entry-level job market because their outputs from this project prove they can meet industry expectations. They also get to have some experience on if that desired industry is right for them. Because this course covers both research and design. Say you're a student that isn't quite sure which side of the field they want to go into. This is a chance to see what the industry would expect from a researcher or a designer. Uh it's also just great networking and the output of the course uh can be a resume and portfolio piece. So all of those things and being able to say that your portfolio piece came with an industry partner is really really powerful for students. So keep that in mind. That is the course that I was thinking of when I was in this mindset of in 2024 with all of these statements about how the market was not improving, mentorship was not possible. And I selfishly just really wanted to make this happen for me. Like for my mentorship goals at work, I said it's time. I don't care if I'm the only person that is in charge of this. Let's make it happen. Uh and with that I put together a pitch for my team to say let me do this as my mentorship opportunity. It's towards my goals. You won't regret it. And it was great for me but two years later it's also been really really great for not only students but for the business as well. And one of the reasons why I wanted to sit down and have this talk today is that we have found a lot of success not just just for in the entire collaboration and after everything that we've done in this mentorship mentorship framework we've established I wanted to share that out with the broader community. So if you want to have a little bit more mentorship in your professional experience this is another way that you can make that happen. So then the question of course becomes how do we do this? Uh this slide here is directly verbatim the pitch that I gave to my leadership at Verizon Connect when I was trying to get them to sign on to this. Uh it has the benefits to the business and then the benefits to the students. Now I want to empas here that this is with minimal participation in the project not including all of the additional things that you can do that I'm going to talk about. uh this is what you get just from being an industry partner. Uh so first the business is going to get foundational research with no capital expenditure because you are outsourcing that innovation to students your internal teams your in your UX researchers uh you're not spending money on them doing that work. Now there might be times during the course of the semester where you might want to secure a small budget for part for recruiting participants but because your internal researchers are not doing the work uh you're not spending money on them and if they were you would have secured that participant recruitment budget anyway. Uh second there is a fresh perspective on industry problems and more than that those ideas that the students come up with are going to be unburdened by your existing product ecosystem. You can really dream big with it. And then for the students like I've been talking about they're going to get that professional mentorship networking opportunities experience with real industry challenges and then a portfolio piece at the very end. So, what I wanted to do now is just walk through all of the different activities that my team does every year in order to make this mentorship framework a reality. Uh, you don't have to do every single thing I'm about to talk about. I would suggest that you just listen to some of the things that we have implemented and then pick and choose the ones that you think would be best for your business if you wanted to try it out yourself. So this timeline shows uh the course overseeing project section is the course itself which takes place from August to December. Uh but there are some preparations that the the timeline does go back till May and that's because we want to make sure that everything is ready to go uh before the students have arrived at your door. So there are four stages that we keep in mind. There is the pitch stage which is you know things like buyin understanding what prompts you're even going to ask the students. Then there's the prep stage which is we know what we want to ask and we know we're involved but we want to make sure the students have the resources they need. Then there is the management which is overseeing the project itself. Uh, and then once the course is complete, you're going to have the output stage where you are saving all of that valuable research and design work so that it can continue to have impact to your business years into the future. So, let's get started with the pitch. Uh, the first thing in the pitch is legal approval. I don't have a ton to say about this stage other than that you have to do it and that it's going to be different at every b every business. Uh for us, part of the reason we started this timeline so early is so we'd have plenty of time to get that legal approval. Sometimes you might need to bug them a few times. They're busy, but once you get that approval, you're good for future years, too. Um, one thing that's worth noting as well is that a course that invites industry partners to participate probably has a template NDA. Um, so you should secure that from whatever professor or course you're working with and then uh send that to your legal team so that they can edit it for you. Uh, but that's all that has to do with legal approval. Once you know that legal is going to let this take place at all, you're good to start doing team buyin. Uh, and this can be as simple as sending out an invitation to a quick call to talk about what to expect maybe to your direct team. Uh, it also could be reaching out to um during monthly staff meetings or things like that and saying, "This is something that we want to that we're trying to do. If you're interested, let me know. Uh, so we can keep you updated on everything as it progresses." Uh, but this really is just getting the word out. The next thing here from the pitch is generating the prompts. And this is the one thing that you really need to have prepared uh before you enter in before you get to August. Uh and now you could simply have this be something that you personally decide like let's say you're a onewoman show running this project kind of like me in 2024. You can just say I'm a safety expert at Verizon Connect. So, my projects are going to focus on safety and only safety because if all else falls through and I'm all alone on this project, I know I can advise that. That's what we did in 2024 and it went well. But it can actually go even better. So my suggestion if you want to put a little more effort into generating your prompts is to go and ask your leaders about what the big problems for the business are so that you can tailor your outsourcing of innovation to these students to indust to the big challenges for your leaders. Ask questions like what problems are top of mind for you right now? What topics do you wish you could do more research on? What topics keep getting pushed back on the road map that you really want to see researched? Uh, and this could be as simple as like a 30-minute brain dump with your leaders. Um, and then once you have all that information, you can map that feedback on a value matrix. So you compare, say, what we do is compare feasibility to student interest. So examples of what feasibility might mean for you could be, is this topic space well-defined? Am I gonna have to if I'm am I gonna have to run back to that leader and ask follow-up questions about what this problem is? Maybe that's a little bit less feasible. Uh then there's can it be completed in a semester's time? If this is a huge project, maybe it's not right for students. Uh and then also can students access all the resources that they would need to complete this project. uh if the project that the leader proposed is one that's really heavily based in internal process, maybe that isn't the best one to give to students. And then student interest is the other axis here. Uh things like would it be fun or interesting for a student to work on? Um that is that could be a factor for you in making decisions. Uh but also like would the solution be unique or eye-catching on a portfolio? Maybe that's something that you would want to uh lend to the students. Um things like for example maybe maybe AI is a really interesting topic for your industry and it would not only be a fun and interesting topic for the students and it would also be an eye-catching piece for uh a portfolio uh something like that. So by the end of this stage you might have a couple of potential prompts and you can narrow down to one or two depending on how many resources you have uh to run student teams. Uh but let's just say we're doing one. So now we have one project prompt that we have sent to the to the uh to the course and we are ready to go with all of that. The pitch is now complete and we can move on to the prep stage. So the first thing to do in the prep stage is to follow through on that team buyin and begin recruiting mentors. The reason why we are recruiting mentors now in the prep stage is that you have now generated the prompts so you know the area in which the students will be working and you can tailor the mentors that work with those students and make sure that those mentors have the expertise needed to properly advise them. So let's talk a little bit more about what recruiting mentors can entail. Uh we like to break mentorship up into a bunch of different topics or levels of investment. Uh the first one and maybe the most obvious one being an embedded mentor. This is someone who is going to be directly advising the students and meeting them in weekly meetings to keep track of their progress. Uh that's going to be about 1 hour a week. And this is the most traditional form of mentorship that you might think of because they are the one that's like helping the students along as they go. Uh when we do this when we do this collaboration, we like to have one research mentor and one design mentor fulfilling this role because uh there because the students are doing that double diamond approach. There is research and design involved and we found it's valuable just to have that breath of experience uh in the mentorship team. Uh the second type of mentor is the subject matter mentor. This is someone who wants to be a mentor and wants to interact with students but maybe doesn't have the capacity to be embedded or doesn't quite have the expertise that would be most effective for the students. So what you can do with them is you consult them for expert advice on specific topics. Uh let's say for example that the students wanted to do a design critique but they've never done one before. This could be an opportunity for a subject matter mentor to come in and maybe lead a 30 minute talk on what a design critique is and then they pass it back to the embedded mentors to continue doing their work. Um, this person would be doing more like one hour a month of time commitment. Uh, the third thing is the project operation support. This is the person who manages the team of mentors and make sure those supporting tools are in place. this is basically my role. Um like the I am the kind of person you might think of for project ops support. Uh and this person uh this person's work is going to extend back into that May time frame because they're talking illegal. They are securing buyin and because of that this is more of a 2hour a week uh position. And then I've also included invested stakeholders onto this chart. uh these are the people that care about the outcome of the project but aren't going to be directly involved with the students uh over the course of the semester. So they technically don't have a time requirement but this is like your leader who pitched the prompt who is going to want to see what happened with their work. So with all that in mind the embedded mentor and then the project operations support uh are going to be your core mentorship team supporting the students. Then you can collaborate with subject matter mentors where it makes sense. And then you're going to want to keep everyone including those stakeholders informed. So once we are finished recruiting our mentors, we can move on to the next step which is research and team operations. So a lot of the stuff that the the research ops people are going to be doing. There are three core questions that you're going to want to ask yourself when you are preparing this work. The first one being how are your how will your team be communicating with the students over the course of the semester. The answer to this could be as simple as email. That's all you would need to do strictly. But email because it is because of the way that email is isn't always the most conducive to having quick lean conversations with students giving research feedback. In 2024 when we ran this, we were fully email-based and it was it was hard sometimes because we would have students reach out to us and say, "Hey, we have a request for feedback." And then we'd say, "Well, here's some of our feedback, but we really have a question that's keeping us from being able to finalize our feedback for you." And then that student wouldn't respond immediately. they'd have to go consult their team members and then next thing we know it's been 24 hours and they just ask for some quick feedback on something. All that is to say, if you have the capacity, I really recommend that you try to get your student teams involved somehow with access to Slack or Teams or whatever platform you use for work. uh even with temporary access uh that also enables you to get the embedded mentors into conversa regular conversations with your students and it lets you bring in other team members for quick chats if needed and it really facilitates that lean feedback. Uh the next question that you're going to ask yourself is will the students need to access your research platforms to do good work for you? So let's say that you that you are a representative of Starbucks and you are participating in this uh in this collaboration for the students to do research on uh people who go to Starbucks. Uh you don't really need to get them any special participant pools. It can be as simple as the students walking outside, crossing the street and going to their local Starbucks to observe people uh who are using that service. But when you're Verizon Connect and your business is B2B and the people that you regularly speak to as participants aren't really often frequenting a college campus, you might want to go that extra mile to secure a research budget and then ensure that the students can have access to the tools you use to access your participant pool. Uh we use user interviews and what we did is uh we made sure that the students could access and edit projects in user interviews and then they did not have permissions to launch projects. So they would get everything prepared in user interviews and then they would pitch to us why they should have a budget to conduct that research and then once we approved it we would launch the project for them and then they were off to the races. So that just enables the students to be able to have like be able to do effective work with the participants that really matter to your business and your prompt. And then the last area here is shared document storage. Where will the students be storing their interviews and deliverables so you can easily access them in the future? Um this is really really important for being able to get maximum output from the student work on these projects. So I very much recommend that you ask yourself what tools you use as your research repositories and how you can get your students either uploading to them or to another platform so that you can upload them to your repository yourself. Um so with all this in mind uh these are kind of those backend ops tools that are going to help the students to be able to hit the ground running on day one. And once all that work is carried carried out, we can move on to really just onboarding the students and preparing for that. Um, this is making sure that they are the students are going to in August be able to get up to speed with your expectations for them and the specific industry expectations and environment that they're going to be working in. Now, because we've run this twice, we have some ideas of what goes really well and what maybe doesn't go as well. Um, the things that I would really recommend that you onboard students to are first your industry, especially when your Verizon connects and your industry is a little bit opaque to uh like a student perspective. Uh, it's really valuable to get that information to them so that they can again hit the ground running. Uh, also specific project space because there might be some nuance between the industry itself and then the specific problem that they are tackling. Uh things that I don't think are quite as useful is things like company history. Uh in 2024 we tried to onboard them like they were interns, but these are not interns. These are more like consultants. So they don't necessarily need all of that context to be able to do their job well. And the more information you give them, the more like it's a lot to onboard to in a couple weeks time. Uh so you don't want to do too much. Now there are some that could be useful depending on context. Um, I don't think you strictly need to onboard students to your internal team's workflow and process. That doesn't mean they won't ask you though. That's something about students is that they're very keen to learn all about the industry and all about everything that you do. Uh, but you while there might be opportunities for say a subject matter mentor to come in and talk about those things, maybe it won't strictly be necessary for onboarding. And then one thing that could be super useful or maybe not so much is a work or site visit. Um we did work and site visits in 2025 and we found them super successful because so much of our business involves you know fleet vehicles and hardware like physical hardware that is really helpful to see and understand. Uh so we thought it would be valuable to bring them in and show them all of those things. uh maybe if your industry doesn't have that level of complexity or is fully online, you wouldn't need to do uh all of that because it it can be intensive, right? And one final note, the reason we were able to do those site visits is because uh we have an office that is uh about an hour away from Georgia Tech. Uh so we didn't have to spend any money bringing them there. All right. So, with all of this, the prep is now complete and we are at a stage where we're able to just kick back and let the students start doing the work. But we still have some things to do. Uh the first thing is student meetings are going to become a regular thing now. Uh from my experience with Georgia Tech, you have to have like the students can set the cadence of the meetings, but you do need to have meetings with them uh as like a course requirement and and as an expectation as a partner. Um but I would encourage you to let the students take the lead on scheduling meetings and with setting agendas for meetings. uh it is a professional skill to be able to reach out to your core stakeholders like your industry partners and be able to have those have that communication and I would just let them do that also because they're following a course and you might not know in as great a detail what they are working on and what the expectations are. Let them set agendas for meetings and let them decide what's important for them in their core structure. Uh, but one thing that I do want to call out here that could be super useful is you're going to schedule a time to meet with the students weekly or bi-weekly. I would also recommend that you set up office hours, too. And what I mean by office hours is let's say you have weekly 30-inute meetings on Tuesdays. Uh, you could set up like a 3-hour time block on Friday and say optional, no one has to attend, but this is time that I'm free if you want deeper feedback on something. And this will be useful because over the course of a semester deadlines shift around and also the work that they're doing has es and flows. Maybe they are going to work really hard between Tuesday and Friday and they're going to want additional feedback from you that they're not going to get until the subsequent Tuesday after which there's been a deadline. Um having that time to drop by and get that more detailed feedback from you is going to be really helpful for the students. So, we have meetings out of the way, but meetings with the students isn't the only meetings I would recommend at this stage. Uh because you can also have internal team syncs. There are a number of people working on this with you. So, this is an opportunity for you to check in with them. Uh there is two kinds of meetings here. First is the weekly ops meeting. Uh the people attending this would be project ops support. Uh and the purpose of these meetings is to also be keeping track of the status of the project and the project expectations. Make sure that the students are reaching your expectations and are also following along with the course. And then also anticipating and prepping for student needs. To give an example of this, uh the students know that they have to conduct interviews as part of their course. But if they're using your tools for that, like user interviews, maybe they've never used user interviews before. And you as the researcher who is familiar with this platform, you will know that user interviews projects to set them up require screeners. They require planning. They require setting up your calendars. And all of those things take time, especially if you're a team of like four people. And uh I would recommend that you have these ops meetings so that if the students have interviews on the horizon, you can suggest to them that they prioritize certain parts of their preparation so that they're not getting surprised by expectations of say user interviews prep or something like that and they can continue with their project uh smoothly. Uh so that is going to be ops support. Embedded mentors could attend this one. Um that one would be optional for them. What I do suggest you have the embedded mentors attend though is monthly reflections uh with project ops. And you could also call these milestone reflections. Uh the students will have periodic deadlines over the course of the semester. And that's a nice time for you to take a break from talking to the students uh and really have like a check-in with your team. Ask your ask the mentors that are participating, are you achieving the goals that you want to in this collaboration? Are you not? And how can we give you more opportunities to reach the mentorship goals that you are seeking for this project? All right, your internal teams are synced. The next thing here is really just talking about feedback. Um so I have a couple of dos and don'ts that I wanted to surface here um with respect to overseeing students. Uh first is offer suggestions for methodologies. They're going to ask you for what you would do in certain situations and as the professional giving advice. No harm in giving them your thoughts on what you would do. Um, also great opportunity to point them in the direction of useful resources. Like let's say that you conducted a lit review for work and you have some resources from that that you think are really really valuable. You can just send that the student's way and say you might want to consult this as well that might help you get on board with your project. Um, also once they're at the point where they're making interview guides, they have survey templates. Uh, they might ask for your feedback. totally fine to leave comments on those and give them your thoughts if you don't have time to sync with them in person. Uh but the real big do that I want to emphasize here is to let students make mistakes. I know that we're doing a lot as mentors here, but remember that the students are also following a course and the course is designed to get that good output of a mid to high fidelity prototype. The professors, the TAs and the other students in the course are not going to let your students catastrophically fail. uh it is designed to build them up. So even if they are having moments where they might trip, they're not going to fall. And I would encourage you to let them learn from those moments because when you are a student, those are the best things that you're going to learn from. Uh and this leads nicely into some of the don'ts. Don't just give them all the answers. Don't tell them they're wrong. Uh the learning is part of the process here. And maybe you might learn something from seeing how the students are going to tackle adjusting to a mistake they made. Uh and then one other don't resist the urge to ever rewrite any of their materials because they are learning and it's their job to it's their job to you know do this work and then understand the output of it. If you rewrite anything they do that's going to undermine that part of the professional collaboration that you're doing. Uh now you might be tempted. There was time where we a time where we were tempted and it was because the students were so close to launching their user interviews project but they had one last round of edits and they were quick edits to their screener. Uh and we had sent them to the students but they hadn't responded and if they didn't respond to us by end of day Friday we were not going to be able to launch that project for them and they would lose out on that weekend of recruitment. Uh but we resisted the urge to edit their screener for them because that was a decision they made and we knew from the timeline that they would still have time for recruitment. Uh so those are the dos and don'ts. I had one other do which is that there will be sometimes opportunities to bring in other voices from your team for more varied feedback. Maybe uh they've reached a point in their project where they've hit a big milestone. they they're doing divergent designs and they're like it's time for us to pick one. They might ask you embedded mentors uh project ops who do what do you think we should do? And this is a great time for you to say well let's ask the wider team. Uh you can do design critiques for example with uh your larger CTF and this is great for the students because the students are going to get feedback from a more varied group of people. Uh, but also it's great for you because you told your CTF about this project back in May and this might be for some people the first time that they're revisiting the project again. Uh, and they get to see how the project has progressed and they get to be a part of its final decision-m. Uh, but if you're going to be doing something like this, it's going to be a little bit more intensive for you. Uh, reason being the students don't have access to your internal team's calendars. They don't know who in the business they should be contacting for feedback. That's going to fall on you to coordinate. So, you're going to have to do anticipatory coordination with those people to get them on board. Maybe the students have never done a design critique before. You're going to want to have make sure that they're prepared and review that with them to make sure they're up to speed. There is a little bit of extra prep to do these kinds of activities. So, you're going to want to know that you want to conduct it. But if you do, it will be super valuable for everyone involved. And so, with all that taken care of, 4 months later, we're all finished overseeing the project and it's time to start talking about output. So, a course like this is going to have a final presentation of some kind. Uh, and it's a great opportunity to just kick back and relax and appreciate all the students hard work. Um, the course will invite you to watch those final presentations. Great. But I would recommend that you also have the students do final presentations with your team at work as well because like I mentioned with those design critiques, it's closing the loop on this entire process with everyone that you bought into the project. And uh being able to have the students talk to the industry and like be able to do those presentations is great for them because you're building out uh their confidence and their presentation skills too. Um but in addition to presentations, maybe you're bringing the students into the office for this. uh I would encourage you to make use of that time in person and also do some retrospectives with the students and the mentors about your overall experience with this collaboration. And you might think that you don't need to do that. Like maybe it went great and you're like, "Oh, everything was mostly fine." But you can learn a ton from talking to the students and the mentors about just this overall reflection. And some of the best advice that we've gotten to improve this process for us came from talking to the students. So, it's just a time to say what went well, what didn't go well. Uh we use the starfish method when we do this. Uh which is keep doing, do less of, do more of, uh stop doing, and then start doing. Uh but you could do something as simple as stop, start, continue. You could also just have an informal chat about it. Uh but the purpose of these sessions is for the embedded mentors, you'd want to say, "Did you meet your mentorship goals? How can we make this a better mentorship experience in the future?" And then for the students, how can we better support them? What roadblocks did they run into that might have been invisible for us because we were running the project and we weren't participating in it ourselves? You might need to prompt the students a little extra to get them to talk about negative experiences, especially if it went well. So, uh, that's why having some kind of documentation, some kind of fake jam board can be really nice to to massage those conversations out. And then the last area here is preserving artifacts. And this is key for securing the impact of these projects. Uh, so remember in that prep stage when we were doing research and team operations, I mentioned that you're going to want to have a place for the students to store all their documentation. Well, the students are going to present their final presentations and then they're going to be like, "We're done. We we are finished with the semester. Course requirements are over." Asking them, "By the way, upload all of your interviews to this one Google Drive for us, please." They're on spring break. They're on winter break. They're gone. So, by the time you've reached this stage, uh just have them upload that final presentation. And hopefully you have had them over the course of the semester uploading those interviews, uploading their milestone documents, uh any kinds of resources they used to support their research, all of that is in one place so that you now who are not on winter break can upload those to your research repository. And the reason that this is completing that cycle of impact is that let's say a year from now you have a uh a hackathon team at your company that is interested in doing some research on a topic the students did. They go to your research repository looking for justifications for their work. They find the students work and that becomes foundational to what they do in their hackathon. Uh another example could be maybe a project that one of the students did becomes uh a high topic of interest in the business. It finally hits the road map years later. Now you have all this student work that can lend uh a foundation that enables your team to start doing more complex research right off the bat on critical topics. And this is also something that's happened at our company already. Um both of those examples. And then one final talk about those final presentations is by bringing all of your leaders into that presentation, they might not even have to go to the research repository. Maybe they know about this already now because they went to this presentation and they can go right to it uh and use it to generate impact. So with that uh we are now finished overseeing this course. Uh we have completed our mentorship goals. Uh but one thing I wanted to do in conclusion is kind of revisit this what you get slide. So you'll reme you'll remember that I mentioned uh when I was talking at this slide that these benefits come from minimal participation like showing up to weekly meetings. This is what you're going to get just from collaborating with these uh courses. But when you are doing more you're going to get more out of it when you're employing some of those other methodologies that I just talked about. uh it's going to elevate your impact. So your business is going to receive foundational research with zero capital expenditure and then that research is going to be in high impact areas for your business. In addition to that fresh perspective and unburdened ideas, you're also going to have established repeatable networking opport or mentorship opportunities for your team to participate in especially in those times when mentorship is scarce. And then I'm manifesting a bit here, but this also allows for opportunities for full-time conversion. It hasn't happened yet for us, but I believe uh when back in 2025 after final presentations, uh one of my stakeholders came to me privately and said looking at these presentations was like looking at a UX researcher at Verizon Connect's work. Like it really felt like an internal team's work. And I think that speaks volumes to the potential of this collaboration for bringing students into entry- level roles. Uh, additionally, the students are getting benefit. It's not just they're getting professional mentorship. They're getting highly engaged professional mentorship from far-reaching networking opportunities because you're bringing in so many people from the business and you are including more and more mentors into the collaboration both with high high and maybe lower uh levels of effort and then also they're getting experience with real industry challenges and then making real impact with those uh with those challenges and with those solutions. So in conclusion on the topic of impact there really are those three tiers. Uh your team is going to have that bolstered mentorship experience uh that they can draw on especially if they are wanting more. Your business is going to have that expanded foundational research knowledge and a repeatable process if you wanted to to conduct it again in future years or maybe with different courses. And then the students are going to get that experience working with UX professionals to be more prepared for the industry in the future themselves. And with that, does anyone have any questions? >> Thank you so much, Stephanie. I don't see a specific question in either of our chats. Um just some comments about how important mentorship is and really appreciate your presentation. I know at Accelerant we can speak from experience. One of our amazing analysts, Jaden, was an intern uh now a team member who is just phenomenal in what she does and has really learned and grown amongst the team on both the qualitative and quantitative research side. So what you share definitely resonates with me and speaks life into what we have experienced at accelerant. Um one question that I have for you is just collaborating from a mentorship standpoint whether you're um a researcher a designer. How do you prepare your students um or the students for people facing presentations? because that's definitely a boost of confidence that they need a preparation that has to go into that ahead of time. What are some of the effective strategies that you can work with other people who are in the mentorship roles to prepare students for that? >> So when we're talking about presentations, do we mean like output of courses or >> Yes. >> Okay. So what we do with our students is we encourage them because of time constraints and because that end of semester is so stressful and timeconuming. We say like bring the presentation you already made for your course uh because that is going to have a lot of the the real meat and potatoes of the work they did. Uh but something that we do encourage them to do is think about the audience. uh because when their the thing that they designed for their course is structured around the course and proving that they did the work but with respect to the business they care less about like how the students did the work and what the output is. So we might say like focus a little bit less time on some of the more like academic side of things and focus more on impact and uh the the output that they got from say those interview stages and what that means for their final designs. Um and also we have time to practice with the students as well like we'll we'll offer that to them. Like that's something that I always take advantage of when I'm working with my manager at work. Uh so I like to offer that to students too. Great. Thanks. And we have a question from Meline. Her her question slashc comment is, "You mentioned using D and D for dog fooding. I'm a huge D and D fan. Would love to know if the experience you've gained through DND has affected how you run your mentorships. >> Oh gosh. Okay. How it runs mentorship. Um, so what we did for what we've done for dog fooding is like when we're doing the dog fooding sessions and for those that might not be aware, dog fooding is a process of it comes from the phrase eating your own dog food. The idea that you as someone who works on a product knows the ins and out of that product as if you were a user. Uh so what we do in our in our role in like in our dog fooding sessions is we take on the roles of uh our users and we embody them as best as we can so that we can like have that extra layer of understanding what it feels like to be uh a user of our product. So taking that to another level actually our team also does something at work where we we we roleplay stakeholders uh when people are giving like mock presentations uh and we try to like really ham up the their characterization uh like one of them might be like a negative Nancy might be an archetype and that's the person who when the question phase arises they're just like this isn't working like I really don't like this presentation and it helps that presenter to be able to anticipate maybe a more exaggerated version of that uh persona, that stakeholder so that when they finally get into a presentation at work with that type of person, they are very well prepared for it. >> Thanks. Thanks for sharing that explanation as well. Um I don't see any other questions in the chat. Meline just wanted to say thank you for everyone else who's viewing. This session is being recorded. So if you'd like to view back, if you'd like to share and recommend some colleagues or friends watch Stephanie's presentation, it will be available again. Stephanie, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for for to everyone who has joined us. Our next speaker will begin around 1:00 Eastern time. >> Sounds great. Thanks so much everyone. I'm also available on LinkedIn if someone wanted to ask any further questions. Thanks Stephanie.