ACM partners with MentorNet to develop e-mentoring relationships between students (protégés) and professionals (mentors).
Founded in 1997, MentorNet now boasts 30,000mentor/protégé relationships that encourage and inspire students considering careers in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math).
Students gain valuable career advice, encouragement and support from professionals who lend their expertise by helping to educate and inspire young professionals.
Protégés are matched in one-on-one email relationships with mentors—from industry, academia, and government—who have relevant experience in the appropriate technology, engineering, and scientific fields.
Check out MentorNet's newly redesigned website at http://www.mentornet.net/ and this short video for protégés, which will walk you through the steps of creating a profile and connecting with others in the MentorNet community.
ACM Student Members can participate as protégés if they are undergraduates, graduates, post-doctoral students, or untenured faculty. For more information, go to:http://www.acm.org/membership/membership/student/mentornet.
Why Mentorship Matters More Than Courses
There is a ceiling to what structured learning can do for you. A course can teach you a concept, a tutorial can show you a pattern, and a textbook can give you foundations. What none of them can do is look at your specific situation and tell you what is actually wrong.
A mentor can. When someone with experience looks at your code, your career path, or your decision-making, they can often identify the thing you cannot see yourself — not because the information was hidden, but because you have been too close to it. Blind spots are, by definition, invisible to the person who has them. A good mentor is someone who has already made enough mistakes to recognize the ones you are about to make.
Beyond technical skill, mentors provide something courses cannot replicate at all: social navigation. Knowing which companies have cultures worth working in, which certifications are respected versus which are paper credentials, when to negotiate and when to accept, how to talk to difficult colleagues — this kind of knowledge lives almost entirely in human networks. You cannot Google your way to the right answer because the right answer is context-dependent and the context is other people.
Mentorship is also faster. A conversation with the right person can save you months of wrong-direction effort. This is not mystical — it is just information transfer from someone who has already run the experiment.
Free Mentorship Platforms Worth Knowing
The good news is that access to mentors has improved dramatically compared to when MentorNet was one of the only options. Several platforms now connect learners with experienced professionals at no cost:
ADPList — Originally focused on design, now covers engineering, product, and more. Mentors offer free one-on-one sessions and the community is genuinely active. One of the best options currently available.
MentorCruise — A mix of free and paid mentors. The free sessions available through some mentors make it worth browsing even if you cannot afford the subscription plans.
LinkedIn's Career Advice feature — LinkedIn has a built-in mentorship matching feature that many people overlook. It surfaces people in your extended network who have opted in to giving career advice. The warm connection aspect helps — it is easier to get a response from someone who can see a shared connection.
Open-source project maintainers — If you contribute to an open-source project, the maintainers often become informal mentors through code review alone. Good feedback on a pull request teaches you more than most courses. Pick a project you actually use, read the contributing guide, and start with small fixes.
Local meetup communities — In-person or hybrid meetups (through Meetup.com or local developer groups) create the kind of ongoing contact that scales into mentorship naturally. You see the same people repeatedly, which is what relationships are built from.
How to Be a Good Mentee
Mentors give their time voluntarily. How you use that time determines whether they keep giving it. A few things that make the difference:
Come with specific questions. "How do I get better at programming?" is unanswerable. "I am struggling to understand when to use an interface versus an abstract class in Java — can you walk me through how you think about it?" is something a mentor can actually work with.
Do the work between sessions. If a mentor suggests something, do it before you meet again. If it did not work the way they described, bring that back with specifics. Nothing signals that you are not serious like showing up having done nothing.
Respect their time literally. Start on time. Have your questions ready. Do not run over unless they invite it. A mentor who feels like their time is being wasted stops responding.
Tell them what worked. Positive feedback is not just politeness — it helps your mentor calibrate what advice is actually useful for your situation. It also makes the relationship feel like a genuine exchange rather than a one-way extraction.
Ask for introductions sparingly. A mentor's network is their professional reputation. Do not ask them to vouch for you until you have demonstrated that you are worth vouching for.
When You're Ready: Become a Mentor
There is a common misconception that you need to be an expert before you can mentor anyone. You do not. You need to be far enough ahead of someone else to be useful — which, if you have been working in any field for a year or two, is already true for someone who is just starting.
Teaching is one of the most reliable ways to consolidate your own knowledge. When you have to explain something clearly enough for another person to act on it, you find out exactly where your understanding has gaps. Things you thought you understood become much less clear when someone asks a follow-up question you did not anticipate.
Even if you are still early in your career, you can mentor through open-source code review, answering questions on forums like Stack Overflow or Dev.to, or simply being a resource for people in your college or bootcamp cohort who are one semester behind you. The return on that investment is not charity — it is your own technical clarity, your professional reputation, and eventually a network of people who will remember that you helped them when they had nothing to offer in return.