Mentor for beginners

Hello where can I find a mentor?

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Hi @Andrew2004 !

Here are my thoughts on mentorship and how to find one.

A lot of my mentors, both in music(previous career) and tech, came out of already formed relationships.
Sometimes they were teachers I had in college, or older colleagues I worked with, or other developers that I connected with at meetups.

Those mentorship experiences have been great because there was already an existing relationship. They already knew what my career goals were and my current technical abilities.

If you have someone in your life that fits that description, then you can reach out to them and ask if they have time to mentor you.

There are also other sources you can look into as well.
Please be aware that most mentorships cost money because of the time factor.

If you are looking for someone to help you complete challenges in a curriculum, then that will cost you money because that takes a lot of time.
In that case, an alternative would be some sort of free study group.

But if you are looking to just check in once in a while and get feedback on projects, resumes, portfolios, etc then there are a few free resources.

Coding Coach

I learned about this site at one of my meetups.
It is a free site that connects developers with mentors.
I would suggest studying their profiles.
Also, try to find them on social media like twitter so you can get a sense of their personality and see if it would be a good fit.
Then reach out to them on coding coach.

And that’s it.

Hope it works out!

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It depends on what you mean when you say “mentor”. In a lot of ways, you can treat this forum as a whole like a “mentor”. Come here to ask questions or bounce ideas off people. You’re connected not just to peers, but to students much further on their journey and several experienced professionals in the industry. If you spend time here and are thoughtful and engaged, you’ll probably get to know some of us.

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Follow and interact with a few members here. You may also have to learn that essentially we are all in a way alone in our journey of life and learning and we all have to find our own different paths.

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Can you get mentors to check your code as well as answer questions as well here?

Are you asking if you can find a mentor on freecodecamp?

I guess it depends on the questions.

If you need someone to walk with you in the curriculum, then free options like forums and study groups would be the way to go.

There are sites that charge for in depth code reviews and tutoring sessions.
But that can add up quickly.

If you are looking for someone to walk with you for career advice, then a site like coding coach comes in handy.

To be blunt, I find that when most people ask about a mentor, they are asking for a tutor to work for free.

A true mentor is someone that guides you with career and professional advice and maybe with connections. It’s not someone that you can call at 2am to explain why you can’t access your API response outside the Promise.

As Jessica points out, a mentor usually comes from other relationships. That might happen with a professor or a work colleague. I don’t think there are a lot of people looking to invest their time and energy giving career advice to strangers, especially not in a formal, ongoing basis. Most people are too busy with their own careers and would only do that for someone with whom they already have a connection.

If you are just looking to get some questions answered and get some code review (what people mistakenly call a mentor, imho), then you can find some of that on FCC. My advice is to just keep your questions specific. Keep in mind that we are focussed on a specific tech stack here so questions outside that may not get as healthy of a response. There are also things like Stack Overflow, which has a much larger user base that covers a lot more technology turf. But when starting out, I found SO a lot less inviting and sometimes even a bit hostile.

And I can’t stress enough that the number one answerer of questions should be google and reading documentation. That is what you will need to be doing a lot on the job.

Code review is harder because it takes time. For small apps you can probably get some of that here. I also might suggest forming a “club” with other coders in your area (or online) and share your code. At a meetup I used to attend, sometimes one of us would give a little presentation, “Hey I built this this week, here’s what it does, and let me walk you through the code…” and then people might have comments of suggestions.

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i think u wont find better mentoring than the FCC forums. now if you want someone that type out the remaining piece of code u need to complete a project or lets say JS intermediate algorithms , then thats the wrong place. but if you want to get unstuck and unlost on something yhou been crashing your head into a wall 10 millions times, then the forum is the best mentoring.

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