Mentorship Program FAQs
What are the requirements to be a mentor or mentee?
For mentors If you have current or prior experience working in the industry, or have tactical or soft skills that you are an expert at and have great insights on, we welcome you to join us as a mentor. Because we get mentee requests for various design needs, apart from interaction and product designers, we also welcome other design-related backgrounds like visual design, design strategy, design operations and design management.
For Mentees
Designers at any stage of their career, recent graduates, graduate design students in any year, and undergrad design students preferably in the final year.
Time commitment
We encourage the Seattle design community to apply, but also welcome people from other states interested in the program. However please note that the timings of these sessions will be held during Pacific Standard Time (PST) hours.
Will these sessions be virtual or in-person?
The application offers options for both virtual and in-person sessions. Virtual syncs make aligning on a schedule more efficient for everybody and is the popular choice for most of our mentors and mentees. If you have a preference for in-person sessions, we will try to match you with an appropriate mentor / mentee closer to your location with a similar preference based on availability.
What is my commitment?
The mentorship program is 8 weeks long.
We ask that all participants commit to being fully engaged in the sessions for the duration of the program.
We suggest that the mentors and mentees meet for 45 minutes every week via an in-person meeting or Zoom or Google Meets.
We will try our best to match mentors and mentees based on aligned goals, and will provide you with some resources to get started. We encourage the mentors and mentees to chart out their own goals and plan of action at the beginning of the session.
IxDA Seattle will provide you ongoing support – you can message us with any questions that you may have about the program or ongoing sessions. We will host a kickoff event for the mentors and mentees, as well as a Wrap Up retrospective event at the end of the program where you can meet other mentors and mentees in the program and discuss your experience. We also invite you to attend other IxDA Seattle events and workshops during the program.
What happens if I don’t get matched?
We want to do our best to find the right mentor for your needs, so if you do not get matched in this session we’ll continue to keep a lookout to find a match that serves your goals in the best way, and contact you for our next session. In the meantime, we encourage you to reap the benefits of all our upcoming events where we’ll be inviting speakers to provide you with rich design and industry knowledge across several topics.
Still have unanswered questions? Contact us at mentorship@ixdaseattle.org