Making our Fellowship Program Better!

[kdaud (Kakumirizi Daud)]

@jennifer

Have each fellow work on a “capstone” project. This should be a project that can be completed in 4-6 weeks and draws on multiple skill sets that they’ve worked on over the course of their fellowship. Something along the lines of what @mozzy and @gcliff did for their final presentations.

I agree!

@jennifer

Even though fellows may have an area they concentrate on (product management, QA, frontend, FHIR, analytics, etc), there are still some cross-cutting skills that almost everyone thought all fellows should work on. Some of these, like open source leadership, communication, and learning/mentorship, are already captured in our omrs stages.

One of the skill have found so helpful in my current journey is communication. Being able to communicate effectively to my mentor, team/squad members and as well to the community is helping me advance to new levels each day. Though communication skill seems to be outside QA target goals but I was compelled to include it together with other skills on my fellowship plan to enable me acquire those important skills as well before my fellowship journey ends!

@jennifer

Any other ideas for improving the fellowship experience?

Here are three ideas which could be good to think of ;

• A fellow should have a well written plan that captures Learning goals, Target stage, Skill and Expectation. And should update the plan as he/she goes along during the journey. I personally find it helpful each day to reflect on my fellowship plan to know the ladder I need to climb to reach a certain skill set.

• Giving feedback to fellows updates they often make on their public thread talk post during the journey. This can be done by the mentor or team/squad member or any community member. I realized most fellows updates are filled up with likes which are certainly good and encouraging but a feedback through a comment or a question can make a difference in opening the fellow’s mind on the project he/she is working on. I have seen @grace doing feedback on fellows updates and this is a good thing that we may need to embrace in the program. I remember one day she opened my minds through her comment on my public update on how far automated tests will go beyond our community to support even the implementers of our products which I had not thought about before!

• Fellows can use the opportunity of their journey to develop their CV in development. This can be done through compiling all their tasks/activities they have worked on through the fellowship journey on either a google doc or building a simple site that can capture well the tasks/activities and can act as a reference in the future perhaps a good reference for job opportunities and makes a candidate an outstanding one among other candidates. Other fellows can pick a leaf on the one I made at kdaud.com . cc: @sharif @jwnasambu @suruchi @hadijah315