Web Services Alumni-Student Mentoring Program

This project aims to connect students with alumni in career fields of interest. Here are some of the key feature that must be present:

• Both students and alumni opt-in to the process. Both parties agree to the conditions of the program
• Once in the program, students and alumni can edit their mentoring profile, which will be available as an additional tab in their MyAmherst profile. This tab only shows up for people involved in the program. (We should establish what different constituents see when looking at this tab, e.g. students looking at their own, alumni looking at their own, students looking at an alum where a mentoring program has been established, alum looking at students where the link is established, students enrolled in the program looking at prospective alumni, alumni looking at prospective students)
• Students can search for alumni using an additional search tab in profile search. This tab will always be visible, but users not in the program will be presented with a message saying this feature is not available (possibly with the option to make it available).
• Students interested in a specific alum will send a request via the mentoring system. These requests will be collected into a single email digest for each alum (one per day). Requests will appear in the mentoring tabs for both students and alumni.
• Alumni can accept or reject requests, but are limited to a maximum number of students they can mentor in a given semester. Rejected students will remain in the system and on student pages will be presented the same as no action taken.
• After a month, stale or rejected requests will be removed from the students page (or possibly moved to a collapsed div).
• If a request is accepted, an email will go to the student indicating the acceptance.
• Students with a mentoring link with alumni will always be able to see the alum's email address in their mentoring tab regardless of the privacy settings on email. Alumni will need to be made aware of this when they agree to participate.
• Digest emails to alumni will contain a link to a very simple form (just options for "Stop emailing me", "Hide my mentoring information from search", "Get me out of the program"). We will use a salted, hashed key to avoid a login requirement.
• Emails will be sent at the end of the semester for evaluations and an opportunity to update profile information. There will not be an option to opt out of emails in this email.
• At the end of the semester, mentoring links will be removed, but stored. This will give students and alumni the option to re-establish the relationship without searching, etc. Alumni (and possibly students) can also see requests that were rejected from previous years.

One thing that was not mentioned in the meeting, but David wanted to include is that we should keep the mobile experience in mind as we develop this.

Help Desk Ticket

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