Reflection on my 10 years of MAGIC volunteering

I have been volunteering with MAGIC (More Active Girls In Computing) for 10 years. Education and mentoring are topics that have been dear to my heart for more than a decade now.

In this post, I want to talk about my personal journey with MAGIC — how I encountered this volunteering opportunity and why I am still doing it after a decade. And a few things that I’ve learned about myself along the way.

GHC 2007 — where I heard about MAGIC the first time

In October 2007, I was a 4th year PhD student at Stanford University. The Computer Science department sponsored a few of the students to attend the Grace Hopper Celebration. It was the first time ever that I attended GHC. One of the sessions I attended was the Birds of a Feather session by MAGIC. (I found this proposal in 2007!)

A little more personal backstory: at the time, I was feeling kind of lost. Being a 4th year PhD student was a weird time. I didn’t know when I would graduate (or if I would ever graduate); I didn’t know what I would like to do after I graduated; I didn’t know if any place would want to hire me when I graduated. I also felt that I was over-educated by traditional schooling but didn’t feel like I was useful at all to the world.

When I heard about the opportunity of volunteering for MAGIC, which aims at mentoring girls in the middle school and high school, I thought: “This might be a good way for me to give back and feel useful! And I should have enough knowledge to able to teach girls in middle school?”

Even though still having some doubts of myself, I reached out to Ira after her session at GHC and signed up. Reflecting on my career in CS, my affiliation with MAGIC is by far the longest job I’ve ever held. It has been a great 10 years!

Sustainability and enjoyment is important

In 2011, I was curious about different formats of teaching. So I took a year off from MAGIC and tried out a different kind of volunteering (with Citizen Schools): I teamed up with another engineer from Cisco and a Citizen Schools teacher to teach a class of 6th graders in East Palo Alto. We used the Bootstrap algebra curriculum to teach them algebraic concepts via video game programming. While this experience was rewarding, it was also extremely challenging. Long story short, I eventually learned that teaching a whole class was too much workload than what I can provide (and enjoy) at a part-time volunteering capacity.

I think which type of volunteering to do is a very personal choice. Even within education, there are many formats that we can choose from. For my personal preference, I’m a believer of what Ira (the founder of MAGIC) has always told me:

The most important thing is that you’re enjoying the experience.

To my surprise, this advice has not only become why I’m able to continue to volunteer for MAGIC for so many years, but it has also become one of my guiding principle of choosing my work and my teams.

To me, 1:1 mentoring is the most enjoyable and sustainable format of volunteering, given that I already have a full-time commitment of my full-time job, and also want to spend time with friends and family.

Teaching (and doing) is the best way of learning

During the years that I mentored for MAGIC, because my mentees had very different interests, I ended up doing a bunch of different projects that I have never even thought I would be doing.

For example, with one mentee, we explored making Minecraft mods. Here is an example where we changed the texture of blocks:

Here is a robot from Lego Mindstorms:

When I reflect on who I am — I realize that even though I enjoy my work, I’m not the kind of person who goes on and builds a side-project on my own. However, I found that when I’m working with someone else, I’m much more motivated to figure out how to make progress so I can have something to show my mentee.

During these years, not only did I find that I learned many additional engineering skills because of mentoring (frontend dev, phone app, robots, arduino), I also found that I’ve learned a lot about how to get to know a new junior person, and onboard them to new projects so that they can get up to speed, and eventually be able to make progress on their own.

New directions

Since last year, I started trying out an additional volunteering role with MAGIC — mentor engagement. Having this new joint blog space on Medium is one of the ways that I’m experimenting with more mentor engagement. Being part of a volunteering group also means that we already have shared beliefs and values. In addition to sharing resources on how to be better mentors, I also want to use this opportunity to build a stronger network where the mentors share advice on career or personal development for each other as well. What I’ve learned so far is that volunteering work can be a difficult balance because everyone is squeezing out time from their busy full-time job and life to contribute, so even from an organizer’s point of view, it’s important to be very clear what commitment we’re looking for, and what benefit there is for the individual that contributes. I’m hoping to learn more from this new responsibility!

Here are a few blog posts I’ve written on the topic of mentoring:

• Self-Driving Students: Mentorship Strategies in STEM (February 16, 2015)
• Debugging as a way of learning (March 16, 2015)
• Reflection before GHC2015: Mentorship (October 5, 2015)
• Wrap-up meeting with my middle school mentee this year (May 22, 2016)
• Call for mentors in STEM: MAGIC (“More Active Girls In Computing”) (August 29, 2017)
• My self introduction to my MAGIC mentee (October 26, 2017)